A Montessori mother

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

Ex Libris

SIR MICHAEL SADLER

ACQUIRED 1948

WITH THE HELP OF ALUMNI OF THE
SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

\

A MONTESSORI MOTHER

DEDICATED
BY PERMISSION

TO
MARIA MONTESSORI

A MONTESSORI
MOTHER

BY

DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY EDMOND HOLMES

Author of " What Is and What Might Be "

ILLUSTRATED

LONDON

CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD.

PRINTED BY
., WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.

Education
U) Librarx

'7 1i

PREFACE

ON my return recently from a somewhat prolonged
stay in Rome, I observed that my family and circle
of friends were in a very different state of mind from
that usually found by the homecoming traveller. I
was not depressed by the usual conscientious effort
to appear interested in what I had seen ; not once did
I encounter the wavering eye and flagging attention
which are such invariable accompaniments to anec-
dotes of European travel, nor the usual elated re-
bound into topics of local interest after a tribute to
the miles I had travelled, in some such generalizing
phrase of finality as, " Well, I suppose you enjoyed
Europe as much as ever ? "

If I had ever suffered from the enforced repression
within my own soul of my various European experi-
ences, I was more than indemnified by the reception
which awaited this last return to my native la,nd.
For I found myself set upon and required to give
an account of what I had seen, not only by my
family and friends, but by callers, by acquaintances

vi PREFACE

in the streets, by friends of acquaintances, by letters
from people I knew, and many from those whose
names were unfamiliar.

The questions they all asked were of a striking
similarity, and I grew weary of repeating the same
answers — answers which, from the nature of the sub-
ject, could be neither categorical nor brief. How
many evenings have I talked from the appearance of
the coffee-cups till a very late bedtime, in answer to
the demand, " Now, you've been to Rome ; you've
seen the Montessori schools. You saw a great deal
of Dr. Montessori herself, and were in close personal
relations with her. Tell us all about it. Is it really
so wonderful ? Or is it just a fad ? Is it true that
the children are allowed to do exactly as they please ?
I should think it would spoil them beyond endurance.
Do they really learn to read and write so young ?
And isn't it very bad for them to stimulate them so
unnaturally ? And . . . " — this was a never-failing
cry — " What is there in it for our children, situated
as we are ? "

Staggered by the amount of explanation necessary
to give the shortest answers that would be intelligible
to these searching, but, on the whole, quite mis-
directed questions, I tried to put off my interrogators
with the excellent magazine articles which have ap-
peared on the subject, and with the translation of

PREFACE vii

Dr. Montessori's book. There were various objec-
tions to being relegated to these sources of informa-
tion. Some of my inquisitors had been too doubtful
of the value of the perhaps over-heralded new ideas
to take the trouble to read the book with the close
and serious attention necessary to make anything out
of its careful and scientific presentation of its theories.
Others, quite honestly, in the breathless whirl of
American business, professional, and social life, were
too busy to read such a long work. Some had read
it and emerged from it rather dazed by the technical
terms employed, with the dim idea that something
remarkable was going on in Italy of which our public
education ought to take advantage, but without the
smallest definite idea of a possible change in their
treatment of their own youngsters. All had many
practical1 questions to put, based on the difference
between American and Italian life, questions which,
by chance, had not been answered in the magazine
articles.

I heard, moreover, in varying degree, from all the
different temperaments, the common note of scepti-
cism about the results obtained. Everyone hung on
my first-hand testimony as an impartial eye-witness.
" You are a parent like us. Will it really work ? "
they inquired with such persistent unanimity that the
existence of a still unsatisfied craving for informa-

viii PREFACE

tion seemed unquestionable. If so many people in
my small personal circle, differing in no way from
any ordinary group of educated Americans, were so
actively, almost aggressively, interested in hearing
my personal account of the actual working of the
new system, it seemed highly probable that other
people's personal circles would be interested. The
inevitable result of this reasoning has been the com-
position of this small volume, which can claim for
partial expiation of its existence that it has no great
pretensions to anything but timeliness.

I have put into it, not only as an exposition, as
practical as I can make, it, of the technic of the
method as far as it lies within the powers of any one
of us fathers and mothers to apply it, but in addition
I have set down all the new ideas, hopes, and visions
which have sprung up in my mind as a result of my
close contact with the new system and with the
genius who is its founder. For ideas, hopes, and
visions are as important elements in a comprehension
of this new philosophy as an accurate knowledge of
the use of the " geometric insets," and my talks with
Dr. Montessori lead me to think that she feels them
to be much more essential. Contact with the new
ideas is not doing for us what it ought, if it does
not act as a powerful stimulant to the whole body
of our thought about life. It should make us think,

PREFACE ix

and think hard, not only about how to teach our
children the alphabet more easily, but about such
fundamental matters as what we actually mean by
moral life ; whether we really honestly wish the spirit-
ually best for our children, or only the materially
best ; why we are really in the world at all. In many
ways, this " Montessori System " is a new religion
which we are called upon to help bring into the
world, and we cannot aid in so great an undertaking
without considerable spiritual as well as intellectual
travail.

The only way for us to improve our children's
lives by the application of these new ideas is by
meditating on them until we have absorbed their
very essence, and then by making what varying
applications of them are necessary in the differing
conditions of our lives. I have set down, without
apology, my own Americanized meditations on
Dr. Montessori's Italian text, simply because I
chance to be one of the first American mothers
to come into close contact with her and her work,
and as such may be of value to my fellows. I
have, however, honestly labelled and pigeon-holed
these meditations on the general philosophy of the
system, and set them in separate chapters, so that
it should not be difficult for the most casual reader
to select what he wishes to read, without being

x PREFACE

forced into social, philosophical, or ethical con-
siderations. I confess that I shall be greatly dis-
appointed if he takes too exclusive advantage of
this opportunity, for I quite agree with the Italian
founder of the system that its philosophical and
ethical elements are those which have in them
most promise of a new future for us all.

Finally, in spite of all my excuses for the under-
taking, I seem to myself, now that I am fairly
embarked upon it, very presumptuous in speaking
at all upon such high and grave matters, fit only
for the sure and enlightened handling of the
specialist But this is a subject differing from
biology, physiological psychology, and philosophy
(although the foundations of the system are laid
deep in those sciences), inasmuch as its usefulness
to the race depends upon its comprehension by
the greatest possible number of ordinary human
beings. I hearten myself by remembering that if
it is not to remain an interesting and futile theory,
it must be, in its broad outlines at least, understood
and practised by just such people as I am. We
must all collaborate. And here is the place to
say that I consider this book a very tentative
performance ; and that I shall be very grateful for
suggestions from any of my readers which will help
to make a second edition more useful and complete.

PREFACE xi

This volume of impressions, therefore, lays no
claim to erudition. It is not written by a biologist
for other biologists, by a philosopher for an audience
of college professors, or by a professional pedagogue
to enlighten school superintendents. An ordinary
American parent, desiring above all else the best
possible chance for her children, addresses this
message to the innumerable legion of her com-
panions in that desire.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Miss M. I.
Batchelder and Miss Mary G. Gillmore, both of
the Horace Mann School, for helpful suggestions ;
to Miss Anne E. George, who also read the manu-
script ; and to the House of Childhood, Inc., 200
Fifth Avenue, New York, for the use of illustrations.
Dr. Montessori's patent rights in the didactic appa-
ratus are controlled, for the United States and
Canada, by the House of Childhood, Inc., Carl R.
Byoir, President.

CONTENTS

PAGE

AUTHOR'S PREFACE v

INTRODUCTION BY MR. EDMOND HOLMES . xvii

CHAPTER

I. SOME INTRODUCTORY REMARKS ABOUT

PARENTS . . . . . . I

II. A DAY IN A CASA DEI BAMBINI . . 8

III. MORE ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS IN A CASA

DEI BAMBINI 30

IV. SOMETHING ABOUT THE APPARATUS AND

ABOUT THE THEORY UNDERLYING IT 49

V. DESCRIPTION OF THE REST OF THE
APPARATUS AND THE METHOD FOR
WRITING AND READING ... 68

VI. SOME GENERAL REMARKS ABOUT THE
MONTESSORI APPARATUS IN THE
HOME 92

VII. THE POSSIBILITY OF ADAPTATIONS OF,
OR ADDITIONS TO, THE MONTESSORI
APPARATUS . I 06

xiv CONTENTS

CHAPTER FAG*

VIII. SOME REMARKS ON THE PHILOSOPHY

OF THE SYSTEM , . . . 1 1 8

IX. APPLICATION OF THIS. PHILOSOPHY TO

HOME LIFE. ... * . 128

X. SOME CONSIDERATIONS ON THE NATURE

OF "DISCIPLINE" . . . 142

XI. MORE ABOUT DISCIPLINE, WITH SPECIAL

REGARD TO OBEDIENCE . . .154

XII. DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY OF A
UNIVERSAL ADOPTION OF THE MON-
TESSORI IDEAS 1 66

XIII. IS THERE ANY REAL DIFFERENCE BE-

TWEEN THE MONTESSORI SYSTEM
AND THE KINDERGARTEN? . .1/2

XIV. MORAL TRAINING . • . . . . 196

XV. DR. MONTESSORI'S LIFE AND THE ORIGIN

OF THE CASA DEI BAMBINI . .211

XVI. SOME LAST REMARKS . . . .233

INDEX . . . . . . . .241

MARIA MONTESSORI .... Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

THE SCHOOLROOM IN THE CONVENT OF THE FRANCISCAN

NUNS IN THE VIA GIUSTI .... 8

THE MEAL HOUR ....... 22

THE MORNING CLEAN-UP ..... 26

WAITER CARRYING SOUP ..... 26

EXERCISES IN PRACTICAL LIFE .... 56

BUILDING " THE TOWER " . . . -56

BUTTONING-FRAMES TO DEVELOP CO - ORDINATED
MOVEMENTS OF THE FINGERS AND PREPARE THE
CHILDREN FOR EXERCISES OF PRACTICAL LIFE . 68

SOLID GEOMETRICAL INSETS ..... 70

THE BROAD STAIR ...... .74

THE LONG STAIR ....... 74

INSETS WHICH THE CHILD LEARNS TO PLACE BOTH

BY SIGHT AND TOUCH ..... 78

TRACING SANDPAPER LETTERS .... 86

XV

xvi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE

TRACING GEOMETRICAL DESIGN .... 86

TRAINING THE " STEREOGNOSTIC SENSE " — COMBINING

MOTOR AND TACTUAL IMAGES .... IOO

COLOUR BOXES COMPRISING SPOOLS OF EIGHT COLOURS

AND EIGHT SHADES OF EACH COLOUR . . Il6

MATERIALS FOR TEACHING ROUGH AND SMOOTH . 138

COUNTING BOXES ....... l62

INSETS AROUND WHICH THE CHILD DRAWS, AND THEN

FILLS IN THE OUTLINE WITH COLOURED CRAYONS 1 88

WORD-BUILDING WITH CUT-OUT ALPHABET . . 224

INTRODUCTION

BY EDMOND HOLMES

Author of " What Is and What Might Be"

THE Montessori system of education, the
fame of which has recently travelled from
Rome to this and other countries, has found
in Mrs. Fisher an ardent champion and an able
and thoughtful exponent. Had I never visited
a Montessori school, had I never heard of
Dr. Montessori, I should have known before I
had read many pages of this book that there
was a living idea at the heart of the Montessori
system ; for the book, which has drawn its
inspiration from that system, is, in the fullest
sense of the word, alive. My own introduction
to it is perhaps worth recording. When a
proof copy of it was given to me to read, I
promised to return it within a week. But as
it happened I was able to return it the next
morning, having meanwhile read every sentence
in it, for it had held me so strongly that I
found it hard to lay it down. And what

xviii INTRODUCTION

interested me most in it was the witness that it
bore to the stimulating and vivifying influence
which a new idea, a new way of looking at
things, exerts on those who are able to respond
to its appeal, to the power which it possesses
of illuminating their past experiences, of
opening up to them new vistas of thought,
and hope, and effort, of widening their whole
outlook on life.

It was in the Montessori Infant School
attached to the Franciscan Convent in the
Via Giusti that Mrs. Fisher, as a mother and
an educator, " found salvation." She has told
the story of her first morning in the school in
two charming chapters, which deserve to be
read and re-read. I too know the school in
the Via Giusti, and I too have the happiest
memories of the first morning that I spent in it.
Not indeed because I found salvation in it—
for I had already found salvation in an English
village school — but because it fully and finally
confirmed me in what I now regard as the
true faith. I had looked forward with keen
interest to making the acquaintance of Dr.
Montessori and her schools, for I knew enough
about her system to feel sure that it was
dominated by the master principle which had

INTRODUCTION xix

inspired the " Egeria " whose work in a certain
"School in Utopia" I had already tried to
describe and interpret. And I had not been
long in the Convent School before I realized
that the cause of self-education had found in
Rome a supporter and an exponent whose
advocacy of it would sooner or later arrest the
attention of the whole educational world.

As regards their antecedents, their starting-
points, and their lines of approach, Dr.
Montessori and the " Egeria" of my book had
little or nothing in common ; but the less they
had in common, the more significant is the fact
that they converged at last on the same
revolutionary conclusion. Dr. Montessori,
whose great natural powers had ripened in an
atmosphere of scientific study and work, may
be said to have thought her way to that con-
clusion, alternately theorizing and experiment-
ing as she advanced. " Egeria," who owed
nothing to education, who was not a scientist,
who had never studied physiology, whose
knowledge of psychology was in the main
intuitive and practical, may be said -to have
felt her way to the same goal,- — felt her way
from point to point with the patience, the tact,
and the sympathetic insight of genius. Dr.

xx INTRODUCTION

Montessori had done her educational work,
first with " feeble-minded " children, and then
with " Bambini," — children of from two to seven
years of age. " Egeria" had done, her best
and most distinctive work with children rang-
ing in age from eight or nine to fourteen.
What the one proved with regard to " infants "
the other proved with regard to "older
children ""(to use the technical terms of the
Board of Education) ; and what they both
proved was that self-education is the beginning
and end of education, — that the business of
growing, on all the planes of his being, must be
done by the growing child, and cannot be done
for him by his teacher or by any other person.
Why do we educate ? A friend of mine,
who holds informal conferences with Training
College Students, is fond of asking them this
question. He tells me that the usual answer
to it is : "In order to help children to get on
in the world." With this answer as his
starting-point, he leads the students on by
Socratic methods from position to position,
till both he and they arrive at the conclusion
that the final end of education is to enable the
well-educated pupil to become the possessor of
a motor-car. But what of those who cannot

INTRODUCTION xxi

afford to buy motor-cars ? Have they been
educated amiss, or have they merely failed to
profit by an education which might have lifted
them to the motor-car level ? And if the
whole nation were well educated, would motor-
cars become as plentiful as chairs and tables ?
When my friend asks these further questions,
his pupils begin to realize that there was a flaw
in their answer to his original question, and
that a fresh attempt must be made to answer it.
The true answer was given thousands of
years ago by Plato. In a passage in the
" Laws," which deserves to be better known
than it is, he speaks of " the Chief Director of
the education of boys and girls " (the President
of the Board of Education, as we should call
him) in words which our Prime Ministers
ought to bear in mind when they are making
up their respective cabinets: "Both the man
appointed and those who appoint him must
realize that this is far the most important
among the chief offices of the State. Because,
whatever the creature — be it plant or animal,
tame or wild — if its earliest growth makes a
good start, that is the most important step
towards the consummation of the excellence of
which its nature is capable."

xxii INTRODUCTION

Is Plato right in his basic assumption? Does
the nature of man, in common with that of
every other living being, come under the
master law of growth ? I f it does not, there
can be no such thing as a science of education ;
and the teacher can do nothing better, for the
rest of time, than grope and blunder and
stumble along in the dark. But if it does,
education at once takes its place as a branch
of the great science (and art) of farming or
" growth-craft," — a branch which is of all
branches the most important, the most complex
and difficult, and (I fear, I must add) the most
neglected and backward.

For what does education do to foster the
growth of the child ? If the child is to grow,
he must do the business of growing by and for
himself. He must himself digest and assimi-
late the food that is provided for him. He
must himself exercise all his organs and
faculties. And he must do these things on
all the planes of his being, — the mental, moral,
and spiritual planes, as well as the physical.
In other words, he must be allowed to live and
work in an atmosphere of freedom.

Now freedom is the last thing that education,
as we know it in this and other " civilised "

INTRODUCTION xxiii

countries, allows to the child. At every turn
it closes in upon him with dogmatic pressure
and constraint. From morning to evening,
from day to day, from year to year, it does, or
tries to do, for him most of the things which
he ought to do for himself, — his reasoning,
his thinking, his imagining, his admiring, his
sympathizing, his willing, his purposing, his
planning, his solving of problems, his master-
ing of difficulties, his controlling his passions
and impulses, his bearing himself aright in
his dealings with others. So complete is its
distrust of the child's nature, that it will allow
him to do nothing for himself which it can do,
or even pretend to do, for him ; and it thus
develops into an elaborate system for para-
lysing activity, for arresting growth, for sub-
stituting the movements of machinery which,
however complex they may be, are always
controllable from without, for the subtle, occult,
self-controlling processes of life.

That education should have taken this form,
that it should have become dogmatic in the
beginning of things, and remained dogmatic
ever since, was inevitable. For the dogmatic
regime is one which Man, in his desire to
secure order, has from his earliest days imposed

xxiv INTRODUCTION

on himself; and what he has imposed on
himself he has, of course, taken care to impose
on his offspring.

The dogmatist is one who controls, or seeks
to control, the ways and works of others.
This is dogmatism in its simplest and crudest
form. Thoroughgoing dogmatism goes much
further than this. Not content with imposing
his will on others, the thoroughgoing dogmatist
seeks also to impose on them his views, his
opinions, his beliefs, his theories, his tastes, his
preferences, his type of mind. In other words,
not content with denying freedom of action to
others, he seeks also to deny them freedom of
thought and of life.

There are certain tendencies inherent in
dogmatic pressure which, in the absence of
counteracting influences, are sure to assert
themselves.

In the first place, dogmatic pressure tends to
externalize life. For though the dogmatist
may seek to control the inner life of his victims,
he cannot really do more than control their
outward action. And so his demand for
obedience of heart and soul resolves itself at
last into a demand for literal and mechanical
obedience, for the production of results which

INTRODUCTION xxv

he can weigh and measure. Hence comes a
confusion in the mind both of the dogmatist
and of his victim between what is outward and
what is inward, — a readiness to mistake the
letter for the spirit, the .deed for the will, the
show for the reality, the movements of a puppet
for the subtle processes of life. It follows that
the triumph of dogmatism, and the consequent
establishment of what passes for order, is paid
for by the despiritualizing, the devitalizing,
the materializing of Man's life, by a radical
misplacement of the centre of gravity of his
being.

In the second place, dogmatism tends to
arrest growth. For it forbids the higher
faculties to energize ; and the faculty which is
never exercised ceases to grow. If the higher
faculties are to energize, the man himself, as
a free, self-determining agent, must be behind
their action. If, for example, I believe what I
am told to believe, for no other reason than
that I am told to believe it, I am not really
believing. If I conclude what I am told to
conclude, I have not really reasoned. And so
on. It follows that for the exercise of the
higher faculties and the consequent growth of
the higher self, an atmosphere of freedom is

xxvi INTRODUCTION

essential ; and as the raison detre of dogmatism
is to deny freedom to those who come under
its influence, it follows further that dogmatic
pressure, whenever or however it may be
exerted, is inimical to the growth of the higher
self, — having a constant tendency to starve, to
stunt, and to distort it, even if it does not
actually bring it to a standstill.

In the third place, dogmatism tends to
demoralize life. For it substitutes the discipline
of drill, of forced submission, of puppet-like
obedience, for the discipline of self-control, and
so incapacitates its victim for acquiring that
mastery of self which alone can restrain the
lower desires and passions from running their
riotous course.

What dogmatism does, or tends to do, to the
adult, it will do to the child, and it will do it
to him more easily, more thoroughly, and with
deadlier effect. The adult is, as a rule,
sufficiently independent to be able to offer
some measure of resistance to the will of
another. Having been already narrowed and
hardened by dogmatic pressure, he is to some
extent protected by his very defects against
its further encroachment on his freedom. And
as the iron has entered into his soul, as his

INTRODUCTION xxvii

growth has been arrested, as his life has been
externalized, materialized, and deadened by his
education, he has but little to lose from the
dogmatic pressure to which his life will now be
subjected, even if he should be unable to resist
it. Indeed, the chances are that he will not
try to resist it, — that on some at least of the
planes of his being he will henceforth accept
its evil as his good.

But the child, being helpless and dependent,
cannot, if he would, offer any serious resistance
to the dogmatic directions of his parents and
other teachers, — directions which his naive
belief in the omnipotence and omniscience of
his seniors disposes him at the outset to accept
and even to welcome. As his nature is still
green and sappy and pliable, it readily yields
to dogmatic pressure, allowing itself to be bent
and twisted and headed back in this direction
and that. And as youth is pre-eminently the
period of growth, the pressure which tends to
arrest or restrict or distort growth will have
more serious and more lasting consequences in
childhood and adolescence than in any other
period of life.

We must not blame either the parent or the
teacher for dealing dogmatically with the child.

xxviii INTRODUCTION

Living" as he does under a dogmatic regime,
subject as he is to dogmatic pressure of various
kinds, it is but natural that the adult, be he
parent or teacher, should impose the same
regime on, and apply the same pressure to,
the rising generation, — and that this tradition
should be handed down from age to age. But
recognition of this fact need not blind us to
the intrinsic viciousness of the system under
which he works, or make us underrate it as
a power for evil.

What is the prevailing type of education
doing to those who come under its control ?
I will answer this question briefly and in
general terms.

Corresponding with the tendencies which are
inherent in dogmatic pressure, there are three
main directions in which dogmatism tends to
restrict the development of the child and to
narrow the scope of his life.

In the first place, by externalizing his
outlook on life — by compelling him to think
more of show than of reality, more of the
letter than of the spirit, more of the outward
result than of the inward attitude, by accus-
toming him to accept inadequate and fallacious
tests as conclusive, to value himself as he is

INTRODUCTION xxix

valued by those who must needs judge accord-
ing to the appearance of things, to defer at
every turn to ignorant and unenlightened
opinion — a dogmatic education tends to im-
prison its victim in the false ideals and false
standards of "the world."

In the second place, it tends to imprison him
in his own petty, ordinary, undeveloped, or
misdeveloped self. For, by forbidding him
to exercise his higher faculties, it closes to him
the one sure way of escape from self, — the way
of growth and outgrowth. Or, if it does not
actually close that way, it so obstructs it as
to compel the very impulse that makes for
growth to become the gaoler instead of the
liberator of the child's adolescent life. For,
as that impulse continues to operate with
steady pressure from within even when the
narrowest limits are being imposed upon it from
without, the dogmatic education which thwarts
the growth of the higher self must needs force
its victim into premature maturity, and so build
up in him a stunted, hardened, and deformed
personality which he will readily mistake for
his true self.

In the third place, a dogmatic education
tends to imprison the child in his own lower

xxx INTRODUCTION

or more animal self. For, on the one hand,
by thwarting the outgrowth of his higher
instincts, it allows his lower desires and passions
to draw to themselves too much of the rising
sap of his life. And, on the other hand, by
imposing on him the discipline of drill instead
of helping him to discipline himself, it weakens
his will and so incapacitates him for keeping
those desires and passions under due control.

In these ways dogmatism in education sins
against what Froebel called the " true man-
hood " — the universal or ideal nature — of the
child. And, by treating all children alike, and
ignoring their respective idiosyncrasies, it sins
in no less a degree against the individuality
of the child, the meaning and value of the
latter lying in this that it determines the
particular way in which " true manhood " will
best unfold itself in that particular child, — the
particular way in which, in the fullness of time,
his individuality itself will best be outgrown
and left behind.

The pity of it is, that when the child, who
has been thus maimed, stunted, atrophied, and
paralyzed by education, grows to manhood,
he will impose his own type of personality, by
means of dogmatic pressure, on the rising

INTRODUCTION xxxi

generation, who in their turn will impose the
same type on the next generation, thereby
continuing a process which has been going on
for thousands and tens of thousands of years.
So firmly indeed has this type established itself
that we have long been accustomed to speak
of it, without hesitation or misgiving, as
"human nature." Yet all the while we have
not the least notion what human nature — the
ideal type, the ISea of our race — really is.

I shall be told that I am unduly pessimistic.
But, no — I am a whole-hearted optimist. Ideals
are in my mind as I write, and these must
needs disparage the actualities of our dogmatic
education. But they are ideals which are
neither imaginary nor beyond the compass of
human achievement ; and after all it is optimism,
not pessimism, which makes a man pitch his
standard high and yet believe that it can be
reached.

If we will study history impartially, and with
an effort to enter into the spirit of times and
countries which are not ours, we shall find it
difficult to avoid the conclusion that for thou-
sands of years we have been making — and that
in spite of all our material progress we are still
making — a poor business of life. An American

xxxii INTRODUCTION

lady — not Mrs. Fisher — who had made an
intensive study of the Montessori system in
one or two Roman schools was asked before
she left Rome what general impression her
experiences had left on her mind ; and she
answered without hesitation that what had
impressed her most strongly was the discovery
— for such it was to her " orthodox " mind —
that " the fundamental nature of the child is
intelligent and good." To some of us this
judgment may seem to savour of paradox. To
me, whom experience (in " Utopia," Rome, and
elsewhere) has led to the same conclusion, it
has become an almost self-evident truth. But
if the seed that is sown in each generation is
of so healthy a strain, how comes it that the
harvest is, as a rule, so poor? If the "funda-
mental nature of the child " — which is also the
fundamental nature of man — is " intelligent and
good," how comes it that there is so much folly
and stupidity and moral evil in the world ?
From time to time great men appear on earth
—saints, heroes, sages, and the like — and show
us to what heights it is possible for human
nature to climb. So little do we know of
human nature that we are apt to regard these
exalted persons as abnormal or even as super-

INTRODUCTION xxxiii

normal types of humanity, — as " sports " from
one point of view, as " miracles of grace " from
another. Yet if there is such a thing as the
" true manhood " of which Froebel dreamed,
it must needs be that these saints and heroes
and sages are neither abnormal nor super-
normal types of humanity, but exceptionally
well-developed specimens of the normal type.
And if this is so, how comes it that the average
man falls so very far below that level, and is
still, in our enlightened century, almost as far
below it as he was in the earliest ages of what
we call civilization ?

To me it seems that there is but one possible
answer to this question. Man has made a
mess of his life because he has made a
mess of his education, because the man trains
the child badly, and because " the child is
father to the man " ; or, in other words, be-
cause the risen generation stamps itself, with
all its defects and limitations, through the
medium of education, on the rising generation,
and so makes progress (other than material)
impossible.

This answer opens up an immense vista to
education, and an immense hope to Humanity.
If education has been the source of most of

xxxiv INTRODUCTION

our woes and sorrows and failures, education
may and must right our wrongs.

Signs are not wanting that the dogmatic
rdgime which Man has imposed on himself for
so many epochs is beginning to pass away.
The widespread unrest of the present age, the
tendency to break away from custom and
routine, the revolt against authority which is
taking place in every branch of human activity,
are proofs that Man is beginning to weary of
dogmatic direction, and is trying to feel his
way towards some new scheme of life. This
movement has long been in progress, and what
we are witnessing now is but the cumulative
result of centuries and millennia of spasmodic
and often misdirected, yet on the whole
persistent, effort. The struggle for freedom,
which bulks so large in history, which poets
have glorified, and in which heroes have fought
and died — a blind and chaotic struggle, in the
course of which men have again and again
exchanged one tyranny for another — is, in the
last resort, a struggle for access to the air and
sunshine, for the right to breathe, to live, and
to grow. If the struggle has so far achieved
but little, if selfish aims and desires have at all
times played their part in it, if the liberator has

INTRODUCTION xxxv

again and again become a tyrant, if the people
that has won freedom for itself has too often
denied freedom to its subject peoples, if
dogmatism has controlled and perverted the
very efforts that Man has made to free himself
from its yoke, the reason is, I think, that Man
has hitherto forgotten to call to his aid the one
ally who could have turned defeat into victory
— an ally who is strong in his very weakness —
the seemingly helpless child. Clamorous in
his demands for freedom for himself, Man has
never thought of giving freedom to the child.
Yet the child is worthier of freedom than the
man, and can make a better use of it ; and until
freedom has been given to the child, the man —
stunted and hardened, externalized and mate-
rialized by dogmatic pressure, self-centred yet
wanting in self-control, imprisoned in his lower
self, imprisoned in his petty self, imprisoned
in the false ideals of the world — will fight for
freedom in vain.

In our own age the struggle against dog-
matism is being waged with a fervour and an
intensity — with a blind violence, one might
almost say — which has been hitherto unknown.
As the one merit of dogmatism has been its
maintenance of order, the fierce struggle against

xxxvi INTRODUCTION

it which is now being waged by a generation
of egoists and sensualists may well lead to
grave disaster in the hour of its triumph, — to
the substitution for the deadly despotism of
dogmatic direction, of the still deadlier despot-
ism of anarchy and chaos. If this catastrophe
is to be avoided, we must rear a generation
of men who will prove themselves worthy of
freedom ; in other words, we must transfer the
struggle against dogmatism to the arena of the
nursery and the school.

This is what pioneers like "Egeria" and
Dr. Montessori are doing ; and because they
are doing this, their work, though on a small
scale, is of world-wide importance. I have
devoted the best part of a volume to " Egeria"
and her school. It was in the " main room,"
iwhere she taught unaided some fifty children,
spread over five " Standards," that she did her
most distinctive work. And there (and in the
school garden and in the fields and on the
hillside) she proved to demonstration that self-
education is the only education that really
counts. She proved, in the first place, that
self-education, fostering as it does the growth
of the child's whole nature, must needs become
many-sided in response to some inner necessity

INTRODUCTION xxxvii

of its own being ; for not only, as she felt her
way from point to point, did she make full
provision in her scheme of education for the
training of every expansive instinct, but her
pupils, as if realizing that she had divined their
secret needs, responded with alacrity to her
every suggestion, and rose to the level of every
new demand that she made upon their initiative
and intelligence. She proved, in the second
place, that self-education does as much for
character, for morals, and for manners as for
the more strictly mental powers. She proved,
in the third place, that the growth of the child's
whole nature, which self-education fosters,
carries with it in due season the outgrowth of
the social instincts and the social faculties,
central among the latter being that organizing
power which makes concerted action possible,
and which, as it develops, reacts upon and
facilitates the whole process of self-education.
She proved, above all, that self-education, when
resolutely and systematically practised, tends
automatically to widen its own scope ; for, as
time went on, her school became more and
more autonomous, the burden of directing
their own education, both as a whole and in
its details, being gradually transferred to the

xxxviii INTRODUCTION

children, with the full consent of the latter,
whose loyalty to and confidence in the President
of their little Republic grew steadily stronger
in proportion as, by devolving fresh responsi-
bilities upon them, she gave proof of her trust
in their capacity, their good feeling, and their
sound sense.

When I went to Rome, I found in the best
Montessori schools exactly the same char-
acteristic features which I had already found
in " Utopia." Freedom and responsibility
were working in the bambini of Rome the
same seeming miracles which they had already
wrought in " Egeria's " older pupils. The dif-
ference between the Roman bambino of three
or four years of age and the " Utopian " boy or
girl of ten or twelve was a difference in age
only. In all that is vital and essential the two
were in the same category. But just because
Dr. Montessori was doing (and is still doing)
for "infants" what "Egeria" did for "older
children," because she was (and is still) working
nearer to the fountain-head of life, her work is,
I think, of even deeper significance.

I have said that education is a branch of the
great science (and art) of farming or " growth-
craft." There is, however, one vital difference

INTRODUCTION xxxix

between education and all other branches of
the science. The farmer, the planter, the
forester, the stock-raiser, in their efforts to
foster growth, are all engaged in directing the
current of life into certain channels which their
own needs and aims have defined. When the
forester, for example, plants beech-trees so
close together that they can make no lateral
growth, his aim is to produce, not perfect
specimens of beechhood, but the maximum
amount of timber per acre. The aim of the
teacher is, or should be, entirely different from
this. If he allows education to become or
to remain utilitarian, he will never be able to
reform it. His function is to produce, not
prize-winners, nor scholarship-winners, nor
precocious wage-earners, nor men and women
who will " get on well in the world," and so do
credit to their homes and schools, but rather
perfect specimens of manhood. And if he is to
fulfil this function, if he is to guide the current
of the child's life into its legitimate channels, if
he is to grow his human plants successfully, he
must have some idea of what " true manhood "
really is, he must know what are the instincts
and faculties which he is to help the child to
train, what are the powers and possibilities

xl INTRODUCTION

which he is to help the child to realize. And
this is precisely what he cannot hope to know
so long as education remains dogmatic, and
therefore denies freedom to the child. There
is indeed such a thing as " child-study " ; and it
might be supposed that through it we should
get to know what are the central features of
that ideal nature which is present in embryo in
every healthy child. But, things being as they
are, child-study is carried on under conditions
which preclude its success ; for to study the
ways and works of a child who is living and
working under dogmatic direction is a pro-
ceeding as futile as that of studying the ways
and works of a skylark in a cage.

No, if we are to foster the growth of the
child, we must know what he is capable of
becoming, so that we may understand what he
and we are to aim at ; and if we are to know
this we must help his ideal nature — which is
also his real nature — to unfold itself; in other
words, we must foster his natural growth. We
seem to be caught in a vicious circle ; but Dr.
Montessori has shown us how to escape from
it. " Give the child freedom," she says to the
teacher. " Cease to dogmatize ; retire into the
background, provide the child with the materials

INTRODUCTION xli

which will best enable him to feed and exercise
his nascent organs and faculties ; be ready to
give help and guidance when the demand for
these is urgent, but do nothing for the child
which he can possibly do for himself. Then
his real nature will begin to unfold itself as
surely and as inevitably as the real nature of an
oak-tree will begin to unfold itself in the acorn
that is planted in suitable soil and fed with air
and sunshine and moisture. And as his real
nature unfolds itself, and you learn what are
its leading features, the guidance that you give
the child will become more and more effective ;
but it will also become less and less obtrusive ;
for the more freedom you give him, the fuller
will be the measure of his growth, and therefore
the clearer your insight into his nature, and
the greater your wisdom as a teacher and your
success as a grower of men."

The Montessori gospel of self-education, with
its conception of growth as the way, and
ripeness or natural perfection as the end, of life,
has had many heralds. The parent idea of
self-realization is at the heart of the profound
spiritual philosophy of Ancient India. The
Buddha, who may be said to have mapped out
the path of self-realization, told his disciples

xlii INTRODUCTION

that they were to " betake themselves to no
external refuge," but " be lamps unto them-
selves." The idea that the function of educa-
tion is to foster growth, and that growth is a
movement towards natural perfection, was, as
we have seen, formulated by Plato. Horace
assigned to education the task of developing
natural capacity. The great movement which
we call the Renaissance was at heart a protest
against dogmatic despotism and a claim for
freedom of thought and life. Shakespeare set
forth his philosophy of life, with its implicit
philosophy of education, in three immortal
words : " Ripeness is all." Rousseau proposed
that "Nature" rather than the dogmatic teacher
should take in hand the education of the child.
Froebel worked his way to the conviction that
the end of education is to help "true manhood"
to evolve itself. Tolstoi saw, with the prophetic
eye of genius, that the dogmatic system of
education was doomed. In his own words,
" Education, as deliberate moulding of people
into set forms, is sterile, illegitimate, and im-
possible." A gospel, which has had such
illustrious forerunners, in so many ages and
so many lands, is, I must believe, a gospel of
truth. The breaking light which those seers

INTRODUCTION xliii

beheld was no mirage, but the dawn of a new
day.

The aspects of Dr. Montessori's work are
innumerable, and Mrs. Fisher has done justice
to many of them. There is one, however, to
which she has, I think, done a little less justice;
and it happens to be the one which attracts
me most. Her chapter on " Moral Training "
is both interesting and instructive ; but I doubt
if she has fully realized that growth, just because
it is growth, because it involves the continuous
supersession of a lower by a higher nature, is
the most emancipative and therefore the most
moralizing of all processes. Let growth be
healthy, harmonious, and many-sided, or, if
possible, all-sided ; let it be growth of the
whole being, and it at once begins to liberate
us from thraldom to the lower self (which it
places under the control of the higher), from
thraldom to the petty self (which it annuls
by outgrowing it, by indefinitely widening its
horizon), from thraldom to "the world" (whose
false ideals and false standards become dis-
credited by its inwardness and its progressive
idealism). In itself, in its very essence, growth
is an escape from these and many other thral-
doms,— an escape from every influence that

xliv INTRODUCTION

tends to contract and deaden life. The charm
of manner, the sweetness of temper, the un-
selfishness, the self-forgetfulness, the readiness
to give and take, the spirit of comradeship,
the radiant happiness, which I found first in
" Utopia," and then in Rome, were the natural
and inevitable fruits of a system whose un-
bounded faith in human nature was reaping
its due reward.

Mrs. Fisher will now tell her own story.
She is an American mother, and she is address-
ing herself to American mothers, or rather
to all mothers who speak the English tongue.
In preaching the Montessori gospel to mothers
rather than to teachers, she is, I think, acting
wisely. It is true that in the school, where the
numbers are comparatively large, the children
can help to develop and discipline one another
to an extent which is impossible in the home.
But the teachers of America, even more than
those of England, seem to be under the control
of cast-iron " systems " of various kinds, which

Lie upon them with a load
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life;

whereas the mothers of both countries are by
comparison free agents. And for this, and for

INTRODUCTION xlv

other reasons which are set forth in her last
chapter, Mrs. Fisher hopes that her appeal
to the mothers of her country will meet with
a response which the teachers, as a profession,
could not make to it if they would.

That the Montessori gospel will be strenu-
ously resisted, that it will array against itself
a formidable host of vested interests, that it
will long be denounced as a pestilent heresy,
is practically certain. And one could not well
wish it otherwise. Heresies are sometimes
right. Orthodoxies — systems which have come
under the patronage and control of the average
man — are always wrong. When the Montes-
sori heresy becomes an orthodoxy, the period
of its decadence — as a system, not as a principle
— will have begun.

That day, however, is far distant ; and
meanwhile we who believe in the Montessori
gospel must do what we can to spread it. But
we must set to work with tact and caution,
making no attempt to impose it as a system
on those who are unable to assimilate the living
principle which is vibrating in every nerve and
fibre of it, and without which its method would
be so much deadening routine, and its apparatus
sp many meaningless toys. To regard as final

xlvi INTRODUCTION

the system which Dr. Montessori has elaborated
would indeed argue a radical misunderstanding
of her and of it. There are whole sides of the
child's nature — the musical, for example, the
artistic, the dramatic — on which it is still
waiting to be developed ; while the tentative
application of it to older children has only just
begun. But even if it had been carried much
further than it has yet been, Dr. Montessori,
with her love of freedom and demand for
initiative, would be the first to condemn us if
we allowed it to limit unduly our own inter-
pretation of the principle from which it draws
its life.

For the present, then, we must content
ourselves with trying to permeate the educa-
tional world with the idea which has inspired
Dr. Montessori, — the idea of self-development
in an atmosphere of freedom, — expounding the
Montessori method and describing the Montes-
sori schools in order to illustrate and enforce
our arguments, rather than with a view to
the immediate adoption of the mejthod by our
possible converts. And here Mrs. Fisher's
missionary labours will be of priceless service
to us. For if even a small fraction of the
mothers of the United States and the United

INTRODUCTION xlvii

Kingdom were able to accept, assimilate, and
apply the Montessori idea, its influence would
begin to diffuse itself through the whole atmo-
sphere of our social life, and would at last make
its way from the nursery to the school. And
when this had come to pass, the problem of
ways and means, the problem of interpreting
the idea through the medium of school-routine,
would beorin. to solve itself.

O

One last word of warning remains to be
spoken. The Montessori system and the work
done in the Montessori schools are sure to
be maligned and misrepresented by persons
who look at things from the conventional
standpoint, and cannot, if they would, take any
other point of view. When this happens, we
must possess our souls in patience ; for we
must remember that a revolutionary movement
is in its essence a protest against existing ideals
and standards, a defiance of their authority,
a refusal to accept their verdict. Nor need
we be over-careful to answer criticism or expose
misrepresentation. A too facile acceptance of
the Montessori system by parents and teachers
would be a veritable calamity ; and therefore
misrepresentation, even if it be the outcome
of ignorance, prejudice, and malice, may well

xlviii INTRODUCTION

prove a blessing in disguise. Above all, let us
remember that patience and faith are vital
elements in Dr. Montessori's own genius ; and
that patience and faith are lessons which we
must learn from her if we would enter into the
spirit of her teaching. The very mainspring
of her system is " her great and calm trust in
life " (to use Mrs. Fisher's impressive words) ;
and he who trusts life to the full is proof
against disillusionment and disappointment, and
will never again resent opposition or chafe at
delay.

EDMOND HOLMES.

A MONTESSORI MOTHER

CHAPTER I

AN observation often made by philosophic observers
of our social organization is that the tremendous
importance of primary teachers is ridiculously under-
estimated. The success or failure of the teachers
of little children may not perhaps determine the
amount of information acquired later in its educative
career by each generation, but no one can deny
that it determines to a considerable extent the
character of the next generation, and character
determines practically everything worth considering
in the world of men. Yet the mind of the average
community admits this but haltingly. The teachers
of small children are paid more than they were,
but still far less than the importance of their work
deserves, and they are still regarded by the unen-
lightened majority as insignificant compared to
those who impart information to older children
and adolescents, a class of pupils which, in the
nature of things, is vastly more able to protect
I

2 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

its own individuality from the character of the
teacher.

But is there a thoughtful parent living who has
not quailed at the haphazard way in which Fate
has pitchforked him into a profession greatly more
important and enormously more difficult? For it
is not quite fair to us to say that we chose the
profession of parent with our eyes open when we
repeated the words of the marriage service. It
cannot be denied that every pair of fiance's know
that probably they will have children, but this
knowledge has about the same degree of first-hand
vividness in their minds that the knowledge of
ultimate certain death has in the mind of the
average healthy young person : there is as little
conscious preparation for the coming event in the
one case as in the other. No, we have some right
on our side, under the prevailing conditions of
education about the facts of life, in claiming that
we are tossed headlong by a force stronger than
ourselves into a profession and a terrifying re-
sponsibility which many of us would never have
had the presumption to undertake in cold blood.
We might conceivably have undertaken to build
railway bridges, even though the lives of multitudes
depended on them ; we might have become lawyers
and settled people's material affairs for them, or
even, as doctors, settled the matter of their phy-
sical life or death ; but to be responsible to God,
to society, and to the soul in question for the

REMARKS ABOUT PARENTS 3

health, happiness, moral growth, and usefulness
of a human soul, what reflective parent among
the whole army of us has not had moments of
heartsick terror at the realization of what he has
been set to do ?

I say " moments " advisedly, for it must be admitted
that most of us manage to forget pretty continually
the alarming possibilities of our situation. In this
we are imitating the curious actual indifference to
peril which, from time immemorial, has been observed
among those who are exposed to any danger which
is very long continued. The incapacity of human
nature to feel any strong emotion for a consider-
able length of time, even one connected with the
supposedly sacrosanct instinct for self-preservation,
is to be observed in the well-worn examples of
people living on the sides of volcanoes, and of
workers among machinery, who will not take the
most elementary precautions against accidents if
the precautions consume much time or thought.
Consequently it is not surprising that, as a whole,
parents are not only not stricken to the earth by
the responsibilities of their situation, but are as a
class singularly blind to their duties, and oddly
difficult to move to any serious continued consideration
of the task before them. This attitude bears close
relation to the axiom which has only to be stated
to win instant recognition from any self-analysing
human being, " We would rather lie down and die
than think \ " We cannot, as a rule, be forced to

4 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

think really, seriously, connectedly, logically about
the form of our government, about our social
organization, about how we spend our lives, even
about the sort of clothes we wear or the food we
eat — questions affecting our comfort so cruelly that
they would make us reflect if anything could. But
we ourselves are the only ones to suffer from our
refusal to use our minds fully and freely on such
subjects. It is intolerable that our callous indifference
and incurable triviality should wreak themselves upon
the helpless children committed to our care. The
least we can do, if we will not do our own thinking,
is to accept, with all gratitude, the thinking that
someone else has done for us.

For there is one loophole of escape in our modern
life from this self-imprisonment in shiftless ways of
mental life, and that is the creation and wide diffusion
of the scientific spirit. There is apparently in human
nature, along with this invincible repugnance to use
reason on matters closely connected with our daily
life, a considerable pleasure in ratiocination if it is
exercised on subjects sufficiently removed from our
personal sphere. The man who will eat hot mince-
pie and rarebit at two in the morning and cry out
upon the Fates as responsible for the inevitable
sequence of suffering, may be, often is, in his chemical
laboratory, or his surgical practice, or his biological
research, an investigator of the strictest integrity of
reasoning.

Reflection on this curious trait of human nature

REMARKS ABOUT PARENTS 5

may bring some restoration of self-respect to parents
in the face of the apparently astounding fact that
most of the great educators have been by no means
parents of large families, and a large proportion of
them have been childless. This but follows the
usual eccentric route taken by discoveries leading to
the amelioration of conditions surrounding man. It
was not an inhabitant of a malarial district, driven
to desperation by the state of things, who discovered
the crime of the mosquito. That discovery was
made by men working in laboratories not in the least
incommoded by malaria. Hundreds of generations
of devoted mothers, ready and willing to give the
last drop of their blood for their children's welfare,
never discovered that unscalded milk-bottles are
like prussic acid to babies. Childless workers in
white laboratory aprons, standing over test-tubes,
have revolutionised the physical hygiene of infancy,
and brought down the death-rate of babies beyond
anything ever dreamed of by our parents.

But let it be remembered as comfort, exhortation,
and warning to us that the greatest army of labora-
tory workers ever financed by a twentieth-century
millionaire would have been of no avail if the parents
of the babies of the world had not taken to scalding
the milk-bottles. Let us insist upon the recognition
of our merit such as it is. We will not, apparently
we cannot, do the hard, consecutive, logical, investi-
gating thinking which is the only thing necessary
jn many cages to better the conditions of our daily

6 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

life ; but we are not entirely impervious to reason,
inasmuch as the world has seen us in this instance
following, with the most praiseworthy docility, the
teachings of those who have thought for us. The
milk-bottles in by far the majority of American
homes are really being scalded to-day ; and " cholera
morbus," "second summers," "teething fevers," and
the like are becoming as out-of-date as "fever 'n'
ague " and " galloping consumption."

The lessened death-rate among babies is not only
the most heartening spectacle for lovers of babies,
but for hopers and believers in the general advance-
ment of the race. This miraculous revolution in the
care of infants under a year of age has taken place
in less than a human generation. The grandparents
of our children are still with us to pooh-pooh our
sterilizings, and to look on with bewilderment while
we treat our babies as intelligently as stock-breeders
treat their animals. Let us take heart of grace. If
scientific methods of physical hygiene in the care
of children can be thus quickly inculcated, it is
certainly worth while to storm the age-old redoubts
sheltering the no less hoary abuses of their intellectual
and spiritual treatment.

A scientist of another race, taking advantage of
the works of all the other investigators along the
same line (works which nothing could have induced
us to study), labouring in a laboratory of her own
invention, has been doing our hard, consecutive,
logical, investigating thinking for us. Let us have

REMARKS ABOUT PARENTS 7

the grace to take advantage of her discoveries,
many of which have been stumbled upon from time
to time in a haphazard, unformulated way by the
instinctive wisdom of experience, but the synthesis
of which into a coherent, usable system, with a
consistent philosophical foundation, has been left to
a childless scientific investigator.

CHAPTER II

A DAY IN A CASA DEI BAMBINI

I HAD not seen a Montessori school when I first
read through Dr. Montessori's book. I laid it down
with the mental comments, " All very well to write
about ! But, of course, it can't work anything like
that in actual practice. Everyone knows that a
child's party of only five or six children of that
age (from two and a half to six) is seldom carried
through without some sort of quarrel, even though
an equal number of mothers are present, devoting
themselves to giving the tots exactly whatever
they want. It stands to reason that twenty or thirty
children of that tender age, shut up together all
day long and day after day, must, if they are
normal children, have a great many healthy normal
battles with each other ! Even the kindergarteners
only pretend to be able to handle them for two or
three hours, and they accomplish the feat by means
of incessant amusement, which tires the children
and would drive them into brain fever if kept up
all day ! "

After putting myself in a dispassionate and judicial

A DAY IN A CASA DEI BAMBINI 9

frame of mind by laying down these fixed preconcep-
tions, I went to visit the Casa dei Bambini in the
Franciscan Nunnery on the Via Giusti.

I half turn away in anticipatory discourage-
ment from the task of attempting, for the benefit
of my readers, any description of what I saw
there. They will not believe it. I know they will
not, because I myself, before I saw it with my
own eyes, would have discounted largely the most
moderate statements on the subject. But even
though stay-at-home people in other countries may
have salted liberally the tall stories of old-time
travellers, they certainly had a taste for hearing
them ; and so possibly my plain account of what
I saw that day may be read, even though it be to
an accompaniment of incredulous exclamations.

My first glimpse was of a gathering of about
twenty-five children, so young that several of them
looked like real babies to me. I found afterwards
that the youngest was just under three, and the
oldest just over six. They were scattered about
over a large, high-ceilinged, airy room, furnished
with tiny, lightly-framed tables and chairs which,
however, by no means filled the floor. There were
big tracts of open space, where some of the children
knelt or sat on light rugs. One was lying down
on his back, kicking his feet in the air. A low,
cheerful hum of conversation filled the air.

As my companion and I came into the room I
noticed first that there was not that stiffening into

10 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

self-consciousness which is the inevitable concomitant
of " visitors " in our own schoolrooms. Most of the
children, absorbed in various queer-looking tasks,
did not even glance up as we entered. Others,
apparently resting in the interval between games,
looked over across the room at us, smiled welcomingly
as I would at a visitor entering my house, and a
little group near us ran up with outstretched hands,
saying with a pleasant accent of good breeding,
" Good morning ! Good morning ! " They then
instantly went off about their own affairs, which
were evidently of absorbing interest, for after that,
except for an occasional friendly look or smile, or
a momentary halt by my side to show me some-
thing, none of the little scholars paid the least
attention to me.

Now I myself, like all the American matrons of my
circle of acquaintances, am labouring conscientiously
to teach my children " good manners," but I decided
on the instant, nothing would induce me to collect
twenty children of our town and have a Montessori
teacher enter the room to be greeted by them. The
contrast would be too painful. These were mostly
children of very poor, ignorant, and utterly untrained
parents, and ours are children of people who flatter
themselves that they are the opposite of all that ;
but I shuddered to think of the long, silent, dis-
courteous stare which is the only recognition of the
presence of a visitor in our schools. And yet I felt
at onge that I was attaching top much importance

A DAY IN A CASA DEI BAMBINI 11

to a detail, the merest trifle, the slightest, most
superficial indication of the life beneath. We Anglo-
Saxons notice too acutely, I thought, these surface
differences of manner.

But, on the other hand, I was forced to consider
that I knew from bitter experience that children of
that age are still near enough babyhood to be
absolutely primeval in their sincerity, and that it
is practically impossible to make them, with any
certainty of the result, go through a form of courtesy
which they do not feel genuinely. Also I observed
that no one had pushed the children towards us,
as I push mine toward a chance visitor, with the
command accompanied by an inward prayer for
obedience, " Go and shake hands with Mrs. Blank."

In fact, I noticed it for the first time, there seemed
no one there to push the children or to refrain from
doing it. That collection of little tots, most of them
too busy over their mysterious occupations even to
talk, seemed, as far as a casual glance over the room
could judge, entirely without supervision. Finally,
from a corner where she had been sitting (on the floor
apparently) beside a child, there rose up a plainly-
dressed woman, the expression of whose quiet face
made almost as great an impression on me as the
children's greetings had. I had always joined with
heartfelt sympathy in the old cry of " Heaven help
the poor teachers ! " ; and in our town, where we
all know and like the teachers personally, their
exhausted condition of almost utter nervous collapse

12 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

by the end of the teaching year is a painful element
in our community life. But I felt no impulse to
sympathize with this woman with untroubled eyes
who, perceiving us for the first time, came over to
shake hands with us. Instead, I felt a curious pang
of envy, such as once or twice in my sentimental
and stormy girlhood I had felt at the sight of the
peaceful face of a nun. I am now quite past the
possibility of envying the life of a nun, but I must
admit that it suddenly occurred to me, as I looked
at that quiet, smiling Italian woman, that somehow
my own life, for all its full happiness, must lack
some element of orderliness, of discipline, of spiritual
economy which alone could have put that look of
calm certainty on her face. It was not the passive
changeless peace that one sees in the eyes of some
nuns, but a sort of rich, full-blooded confidence in life.
She lingered beside us some moments, chatting
with my companion, who was an old friend of hers, and
who introduced her as Signorina Ballerini. I noticed
that she happened to stand all the time with her
back to the children, feeling apparently none of
that lion-tamer's instinct to keep an hypnotic eye
on the little animals which is so marked in our in-
structors. I can remember distinctly that there was
for us school-children actually a different feel about the
air and a strange look on the familiar school-furniture
during those infrequent intervals when the teacher
was called for an instant from the room and left us,
as in a suddenly rarefied atmosphere, giddy with the

A DAY IN A CASA DEI BAMBINI 13

removal of the pressure of her eye ; but when this
teacher turned about casually to face the room again,
these children did not seem to notice either that she
had stopped looking at them or that she was now
doing it again.

We used to know, as by a sixth sense, exactly
where, at any moment, the teacher was, and a sudden
movement on her part would have made us all start
as violently and as instinctively as little chicks at the
sudden shadow of a hawk . . . and this, although
we were often very fond indeed of our teachers.
Remembering this, I noticed with surprise that
often, when one of these little ones lifted his face
from his work to ask the teacher a question, he had
been so unconscious of her presence during his con-
centration on his enterprise that he did not know
in the least where to look, and sent his eager eyes rov-
ing over the big room in search for her, which ended
in such a sudden flash of joy at discovering her that
I felt again a pang of envy for this woman who had so
many more loving children than I have.

What could be these " games " which so absorbed
these children, far too young for any possibility of
pretence on their part ? Moving with the unham-
pered, unobserved ease which is the rule in a
Montessori schoolroom, I began walking about, look-
ing more closely at what the children were holding,
and I could have laughed at the simplicity of
many of the means which accomplished the apparent
miracle of self-imposed order and discipline be-

14 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

fore me ... if I had not been ready to cry at my
own stupidity for not thinking of them myself.
One little boy about three and a half years old had
been intent on some operation ever since we had
entered the room, and even now, as I drew near
his little table and chair, he only glanced up for an
instant's smile without stopping the action of his
fingers. I leaned over him, hoping that the device
which so held his attention was not too complicated
for my inexperienced, unpedagogical mind to take in.
He was holding a light wooden frame about eighteen
inches square, on which were stretched two pieces of
cotton cloth, meeting down the middle like the joining
of a garment. On one of these edges was a row of
buttonholes and on the other a row of large bone
buttons. The child was absorbed in buttoning and
unbuttoning those two pieces of cloth.

He was new at the game, that was to be seen by the
clumsy, misdirected motions of his baby fingers, but
the process of his improvement was so apparent as,
his eyes shining with interest, he buttoned and un-
buttoned steadily, slowly, without an instant's inter-
ruption, that I watched him, almost as fascinated as
he. A child near us, apparently playing with blocks,
upset them with a loud noise, but my buttoning boy,
wrapped in his magic cloak of concentration, did not
so much as raise his eyes. I myself could not look
away, and as I gazed I thought of the many times a
little child of mine had tried to learn the secret of the
innumerable fastenings which hold her clothes to-

A DAY IN A CASA DEI BAMBINI 15

gether, and how I, with the kindest impulse in the
world, had stopped her fumbling little fingers, saying,
" No dear, Mother can do that so much better. Let
Mother do it." It occurred to me that the situa-
tion was very much as if, in the midst of a fascinat-
ing game of billiards, a professional player had
snatched the cue from my husband's hand, saying,
" You just stand and watch me do this. I can do it
much better than you."

The child before me stopped his work a moment
and looked down at his little cotton waist. There
was a row of buttons there, smaller, but of the same
family as those on the frame. As he gazed down
absorbed at them, I could see a great idea dawn in
his face. I leaned forward. He attacked the middle
button, using with startling exactitude of imitation
the same motion he had learned on his frame.
But this button was not so large or so well placed.
He had to bend his head over, his fingers were
cramped, he made several movements backward. But
then suddenly the first half of his undertaking was
accomplished. The button was on one side, the
buttonhole on the other. I held my breath. He set
to work again. The cloth slipped from his little
fingers, the button twisted itself awry, I fairly ached
with the idiotic habit of years of interference to
snatch it and do it for him. And then I saw that he
was slowly forcing it into place. When the bone
disk finally shone out, round and whole, on the far
side of the buttonhole, the child drew a long breath

16

and looked up at me with so ecstatic a face of
triumph that I could have shouted, " Hurrah ! " Then,
without paying any more attention to me, he rose,
sauntered over to the corner of the room where a thick
piece of felt covered the floor, and lay down on his
back, his hands clasped under his head, gazing with
tranquil, reposeful vacuity at the ceiling. He was
resting himself after accomplishing a great step for-
ward. I did not fail to notice that, except for my
entirely fortuitous observation of his performance,
nobody had seen his absorption any more than they
now saw his apparent idleness.

I tucked all these observations away in a corner of
my mind for future reflection, and moved on to the
nearest child, a little girl, perhaps a year older than
the boy, who was absorbed as eagerly as he over a
similar light wooden frame, covered with two pieces
of cloth. But these were fastened together with
pieces of ribbon which the child was tying and un-
tying. There was no fumbling here. As rapidly,
as deftly, with as careless a light-hearted ease as a
pianist running over his scales, she was making a
series of the flattest, most regular bow-knots, much
better, I knew in my heart, than I could accomplish
at anything like that speed. Although she had ad-
vanced beyond the stage of intent struggle with her
material, her interest and pleasure in her own skill
were manifest. She looked up at me, and then smiled
proudly down at her flying fingers.

Beyond her another little boy, with a leather-

A DAY IN A CASA DEI BAMBINI 17

covered frame, was laboriously inserting shoe-buttons
into their buttonholes with the aid of an ordinary
button-hook. As I looked at him, he left off, and,
stooping over his shoes, tried to apply the same
system to their buttons. That was too much for
him. After a prolonged struggle he gave it up for
the time, returning, however, to the buttons on his
frame with entirely undiminished ardour.

Next to him sat a little girl, with a pile of small
pieces of money before her on her tiny table. She
was engaged in sorting these into different piles,
according to their size, and, though I stood by her
some time, laughing at the passion of accuracy which
fired her, she was so absorbed that she did not even
notice my presence. As I turned away I almost
stumbled over a couple of children sitting on the
floor, engaged in some game with a variety of blocks
which looked new to me. They were ten squared
rods of equal thickness, of which the shortest looked
to be a tenth of the length of the longest, and the
others of regularly diminishing lengths between these
two extremes. These were painted in alternate
stripes of red and blue, these stripes being the same
width as the shortest rod. The children were put-
ting these together in consecutive order so as to
make a sort of series, and although they were evi-
dently much too young to count, they were aiding
themselves by touching with their fingers each of
the painted stripes, and verifying in this way the
length of the rod. I could not follow this process,
2

18 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

although it was plainly something arithmetical, and
turned to ask the teacher about it.

I saw her across the room engaged in tying a
bandage about a child's eyes. Wondering if this
were some new scientific form of punishment, I
stepped to that part of the room and watched the
subsequent proceedings. The child, his lips curved
in an expectant smile, even laughing a little in
pleasant excitement, turned his blindfolded face to
a pile of small pieces of cloth before him. Several
children, walking past, stopped and hung over the
edge of his desk with lively interest. The boy drew
out from the pile a piece of velvet. He felt this
intently, running the sensitive tips of his fingers
lightly over the nap, and cocking his head on one
side in deep thought. The child-spectators gazed
at him with sympathetic attention. When he gave
the right name, they all smiled and nodded their
heads in satisfaction. He drew out another piece
from the big pile, coarse cotton cloth this time, which
he instantly recognized ; then a square of satin over
which his little finger-tips wandered with evident
sensuous pleasure. His successful naming of this
was too much for his envious little spectators.
They turned and fled toward the teacher, and when
I reached her, she was the centre of a little group
of children, all clamouring to be blindfolded.

" How they do love that exercise ! " she said, look-
ing after them with shining eyes ... I could have
sworn, with mother's eyes !

A DAY IN A CASA DEI BAMBINI 19

" Are you too busy and hurried," I asked, " to
explain to me the game those children are playing
with the red and blue rods ? "

She answered with some surprise, " Oh, no, I'm
not busy and hurried at all ! " (quite as though we
were not all living in the twentieth century) and went
on, " The children can come and find me if they
need me."

So I had my first lesson in the theory of
self-education and self-dependence underlying the
Montessori apparatus, to the accompaniment of occa-
sional requests for aid, or demands for sympathy
over an achievement, made in clear baby treble.
That theory will be taken up later in this book,
as this chapter is intended only to be a plain nar-
ration of a few of the sights encountered by an
ordinary observer in a morning in a Montessori
school.

After a time I noticed that four little girls were
sitting at a neatly-ordered small table, spread with
a white cloth, apparently eating their luncheons.
The teacher, in answer to my inquiring glance at
them, explained that it was their turn to be the
waitresses that day for the children's lunch, and so
they ate their own meal first.

She was called away just then, and I sat looking
at the roomful of busy children, listening to the
pleasant murmur of their chats together, watching
them move freely about as they liked, noting their
absorbed, happy concentration on their tasks. Al-

20 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

ready some of the sense of the miraculous which
had been so vivid in my mind during my first survey
of the school was dulled, or rather, explained away.
Now that I had seen some of the details composing
the picture, the whole seemed more natural. It was
not surprising, for instance, that the little girl
sorting the pieces of money should not instead be
pulling another child's hair, or wandering in aimless
idleness about the room. It was not necessary
either to force or exhort her to be a quiet and
untroublesome citizen of that little republic. She
would no more leave her fascinating occupation to
go and " be naughty " than a professor of chemistry
would leave an absorbing experiment in his labora-
tory to go and rob a candy-store. In both cases it
would be leaving the best sort of a " good time " for
a much less enjoyable undertaking.

In the midst of these reflections (my first glimmer
of understanding of what it was all about), a lively
march on the piano was struck up. Not a word
was spoken by the teacher, indeed I had not yet
heard her voice raised a single time to make a
collective remark to the whole body of children, but
at once, acting on the impulse which moves us all
to run down the street towards the sound of a brass
band, most of the children stopped their work and
ran towards the open floor-space near the piano.
Some of the older ones, of five, formed a single-file
line, which was rapidly recruited by the monkey-like
imitativeness of the little ones, into a long file.

A DAY IN A CASA DEI BAMBINI 21

The music was martial, the older children held their
heads high and stamped loudly as they marched
about, keeping time very accurately to the strongly
marked rhythm of the tune. The little tots did their
baby best to copy their big brothers and sisters, some
of them merely laughing and stamping up and down
without any reference to the time, others evidently
noticing a difference between their actions and those
of the older ones, and trying to move their feet more
regularly.

No one had suggested that they should leave their
work-tables to play in this way (indeed a few too
absorbed to heed the call of the music still hung in-
tently over their former occupations), no one suggested
that they should step in time to the music, no one
corrected them when they did not. The music sud-
denly changed from a swinging marching air to a low,
rhythmical croon. The older children instantly stopped
stamping and began trotting noiselessly about on
their tip-toes, imitated again as slavishly as possible
by the admiring smaller ones. The uncertain control
of their equilibrium by these little ones made them
stagger about, as they practised this new exercise,
like little bacchantes, intoxicated with rhythm, which
their glowing faces of delight seem to proclaim them.

I was penetrated with that poignant, almost tearful,
sympathy in their intense enjoyment which children's
pleasure awakens in every adult who has to do with
them. " Ah, what a good time they are having ! "
I cried to myself, and then reflected that they had

22

been having some sort of very good time ever since
I had come into the room. And yet even my un-
practised eye could see a difference between this
good time and the kindergarten, charming as that
is to watch. No prettily-dressed, energetic, thorough-
going young lady had beckoned the children away
from their self-chosen occupations. There was no set
circle here with the lovely teacher in the middle, and
every child's eyes fastened constantly on delightful
but also overpowering adult personality. No set
" game " was being played, the discontinuation of
which depended on the teacher's guess as to when the
children were becoming tired. Indeed, as I reflected
on this, I noticed that, although the bigger ones were
continuing their musical march with undiminished
pleasure, the younger ones had already exhausted
the small amount of consecutive interest their infant
organisms were capable of. Without spoiling the
fun for the others, indeed without being observed,
they had stopped dancing and prancing as suddenly
as they began, and, with the kitten-like fitfulness of
their age, were wandering away in groups of two
and three out to the great, open courtyard.

I suppose they went on playing quieter games
there, but I did not follow them, so absorbed was I in
watching the four little girls who had now at last
finished their very leisurely meal and were preparing
the tables for the other children. They were about
four and a half and five years old, an age at which
I should have thought children as capable of solving

A DAY IN A CASA DEI BAMBINI 23

a problem in calculus as of undertaking, without
supervision, to set tables for twenty other babies.
They went at their undertaking with no haste,
indeed with a slowness which my racial impatience
found absolutely excruciating. They paused con-
stantly for prolonged consultations, and to verify
and correct themselves as they laid the knife, fork,
spoon, plate, and napkin at each place. Interested as
I was, and beginning, as I did, to understand a little
of the ideas of the school, I was still so under the
domination of my lifetime of over-emphasis on the
importance of the immediate result of an action, that
I felt the same impulse I had restrained with difficulty
beside the buttoning boy — to snatch the things from
their incompetent little hands and whisk them into
place on the tables.

But then I noticed that the clock showed only a
little after eleven, and that evidently the routine of
the school was planned expressly so that there should
be no need for haste.

The phrase struck my mental ear curiously, and
arrested my attention. I reflected on that condition
with the astonished awe of a modern, meeting it
almost for the first time. " No need for haste " — it
was like being transported into the timeless ease of
eternity.

And then I fell to asking myself why there was
always so much need for haste in my own life and in
that of my children ? Was it, after all, necessary ?
What were we hurrying to accomplish? I remem-

24 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

bered my scorn of the parties of Cook's tourists, clat-
tering into the Sistine Chapel for a momentary glance
at the achievement of a lifetime of genius, painted
on the ceiling, and then galloping out again for a
hop-skip-and-jump race down through the Stanze of
Raphael. It occurred to me, disquietingly, that pos-
sibly, instead of really training my children, I might
be dragging them headlong on a Cook's tour through
life. It also occurred to me that if the Montessori
ideas were taken up in my family, the children would
not be the only ones to profit by them.

When I emerged from this brown study, the little
girls had finished their task and there stood before
me tables set for twenty little people, set neatly and
regularly, without an item missing. The children,
called in from their play in the courtyard, came
marching along (they do take collective action when
collective interests genuinely demand it), and sat
down without any suggestion. I held my breath to
see the four little waitresses enter the room, each
carrying a big tureen full of hot soup. I would not
have trusted a child of that age to carry a glass of
water across a room. The little girls advanced
slowly, their eyes fixed on the contents of their
tureens, their attention so concentrated on their
all-important enterprise that they seemed entirely
oblivious of the outer world. A fly lighted on the nose
of one of these solemnly absorbed babies. She twisted
the tip of that feature, making the most grotesque
grimaces in her effort to dislodge the tickling in-

A DAY IN A CAS A DEI BAMBINI 25

truder, but not until she had reached a table and set
down her sacred tureen in safety, did she raise her
hand to her face. I revised on the instant all my
fixed convictions about the innate heedlessness and
lack of self-control of early childhood ; especially as
she turned at once to her task of ladling out the soup
into the plates of the children at her table, a feat
which she accomplished as deftly as any adult could
have done.

The napkins were unfolded ; the older children
tucked them under their chins and began to eat their
soup. The younger ones imitated them more or less
handily, though with some the process meant quite
a struggle with the napkin. One little boy, only one
in all that company, could not manage his. After
wrestling with it, he brought it to the teacher, who
had dropped down on a chair near mine. So sure was
I of what her action would be that I fairly felt my
own hands automatically follow hers in the familiar
motions of tucking a napkin under a child's round chin.

I cannot devise any way to set down on paper
with sufficient emphasis the fact that she did not tuck
in that napkin. She held it up in her hands, showed
the child how to take hold of a larger part of the
corner than he had been grasping, and, illustrating
on herself, gave him an object-lesson. Then she gave
it back to him. He had caught the idea evidently,
but his undisciplined little fingers, out of sight under
his chin, would not follow the direction of his
brain, which, from the grave intentness of his baby

26 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

face, was evidently working at top speed. With a
sigh, that irresistible sigh of the little child, he
took out the crumpled bit of linen and looked at it
sadly. I clasped my hands together tightly to keep
them from accomplishing the operation in a twinkling.
Why, the poor child's soup was getting cold !

Again I wish to reiterate the statement that the
teacher did not tuck in that napkin. She took it
once more and went through very slowly all the
necessary movements. The child's big black eyes
fastened on her in a passion of attention, and I
noticed that his little empty hands followed auto-
matically the slow, distinctly separated and analysed
movements of the teacher's hands. When she gave
the napkin back to him, he seized it with an air of
resolution which would have done honour to Napoleon,
grasping it firmly and holding his wandering baby
wits together with the aid of a determined frown.
He pulled his collar away from his neck with one
hand, and, still frowning determinedly, thrust a large
corner of the napkin down with the other, spreading
out the remainder on his chest, with a long sigh of
utter satisfaction. As he trotted back to his place,
I noticed that the incident had been observed by
several of the children near us, on whose smiling
faces, as they looked at their triumphant little com-
rade, I could see the reflection of my own gratified
sympathy. One of them reached out and patted the
napkin as its proud wearer passed.

But I had not been all the morning in that chil-

WAITER CARRYING SOUP

THE MORNING CLEAN-UP

A DAY IN A CAS A DEI BAMBINI 27

dren's home, perfect, though not made with a mother's
hands, without having my mother's jealousy sharply
aroused. A number of things had been stirring up
protests in my mind. I was alarmed at the sight of
all these babies, happy, wisely occupied, perfectly
good, and learning unconsciously the best sort of
lessons, and yet in an atmosphere differing so entirely
from all my preconceived ideas of a home. All this
might be all very well for Italian mothers so poor
that they were obliged to leave their children in order
to go out and help to earn the family living ; or for
English mothers, who expect as a matter of course that
their little children shall spend most of their time with
nursemaids and governesses. But I could not spare
my children, I told myself. I asked nothing better
than to have them with me every moment they were
awake. What was to be done about this ominously
excellent institution which seemed to treat the chil-
dren more wisely than I, for all my efforts ? I felt an
uneasy, apprehensive hostility towards these methods,
contrasting so entirely with mine, for mine were, I
assured myself hotly, based on the most absolute,
supreme mother's love for the child.

I now turned to the teacher and said protestingly,
" That would have been a very little thing to do for
a child."

She laughed. " I'm not his nursemaid. I'm his
teacher," she replied.

" That's all very well, but his soup will be cold, you
know, and he will be late to his luncheon ! "

28 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

She did not deny this, but she did not seem as struck
as I was by the importance of the fact. She answered
whimsically, " Ah, one must remember not to obtrude
one's adult materialism into the idealistic world of
children. He is so happy over his victory over him-
self that he wouldn't notice if his soup were iced."

" But warm soup is a good thing, a very good
thing," I insisted, " and you have literally robbed
him of his. More than that, I seem to see that all
this insistence on self-dependence for children must
interfere with a great many desirable regularities of
family life."

She looked at me indulgently. " Yes, warm soup
is a good thing, but is it such a very important thing ?
According to our adult standards it is more palatable,
but it's really about as good food eaten cold, isn't
it? And, anyhow, he eats it cold only this once.
You'd snatch him away from his plate of warm soup
without scruple if you thought he was sitting in a
draught and would take cold. Isn't his moral health
as important as his physical ? "

" But it might be very inconvenient for someone
else, in an ordinary home, to wait so interminably for
him to learn to wait on himself."

Her answer was a home-thrust. " If it's too much
trouble to give him the best conditions at home,
wouldn't he be better sent to a Casa dei Bambini,
which has no other aim than his development ? "

This silenced me for a time. I turned away, but
was recalled by her remarking, " Besides, I've put him

A DAY IN A CASA DEI BAMBINI 29

more in the way of getting his soup hot for the
future. To-day's plateful would have been warm ;
but how about to-morrow and the day after, unless
you or some other grown-up happened to be at hand
to wait on him. And on my part, what could I do,
if all twenty-five of the children were helpless ? "

I seized on this opportunity to voice some of the
mother's jealousy which underlay all my extreme ad-
miration and astonishment at the sights of the morn-
ing, "If you didn't keep such an octopus clutch on
the children, separating them all day in this way from
their own families, if they were sent home to eat their
luncheons, why, there would be mothers enough to go
round. They would be only too glad to tuck the
little napkins in ! "

The teacher looked at me, level-browed, and said
with a dry, enigmatic accent which made me reflect
uneasily, long afterwards, on her words, " They cer-
tainly would. Do you really think that would be an
improvement ? "

CHAPTER III

MORE ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS IN A CASA DEI
BAMBINI

OF course one day's observations do not give even
a bird's-eye view of all the operations of a Montessori
school, and this chapter is intended to supplement
somewhat the very incomplete survey of the last,
and to touch, at least in passing, upon some of
the other important activities in which the children
are engaged. If this description seems lacking in con-
tinuity and uniformity, it represents all the more
faithfully the impressions of an observer of a Casa
dei Bambini. For there one sees no trace of the
slightly Prussian uniformity of action to which we
are accustomed in even the freest of our primary
schools and kindergartens. You need not expect at
ten o'clock to hear the " ten o'clock class in reading,"
for possibly on that day no child will happen to
desire to read. You need not think that the teacher
will call up the star pupil to make him write for you.
He may be lying on the floor absorbed in an arith-
metical game, and a Montessori teacher would as soon
blow up her schoolroom with dynamite as interfere

3°

WHAT HAPPENS IN A CASA DEI BAMBINI 31

with the natural direction taken for the moment by
the self-educating instincts of her children.

In planning a visit to a Casa dei Bambini, you can
be sure of only one thing, not, however, an incon-
siderable thing — that all the children will be happily
absorbed in some profitable undertaking. It never
fails. There are no " blue Mondays." Rain or
shine outdoors, inside the big room there always
blows across the heart of the visitor a fine, tonic
breath of free and hence never listless life. On days
in winter when the sirocco blows, the debilitating
wind from Africa, which reduces the whole population
of Rome to inert and melancholy passivity, the chil-
dren in the Casa are perhaps not quite so briskly
energetic as usual in their self-imposed task of teach-
ing and governing themselves, but they are by far the
most briskly energetic Romans in the city.

It is all so interesting to them, they cannot stop to
be bored or naughty. Just as one of our keen,
hungry-minded Yankee school-teachers, turned loose
for the first time in an historic European city, throws
herself with such fervour into the exploration of all
its fascinating and informing sights that she is as-
tonished to hear later that it was one of the hottest
and most trying summers ever known, so these
equally hungry-minded, healthy children fling them-
selves upon the fascinating and informing wonders
of the world about them with such ardour that they
are always astonished when the long happy day is
done.

82 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

The freedom accorded them is absolute, the only
restriction being that they must not hurt or annoy
others, a rule which, after the first brief chaos at
the beginning, when the school is being organized, is
always respected with religious care by these little
citizens ; although to call a Montessori school a " little
republic " and the children " little citizens," gives much
too formal an idea of the free-and-easy, happily
unforced and natural relations of the children with
each other. The phrase Casa dei Bambini is being
translated everywhere nowadays by English-speaking
people as " The House of Childhood," whereas its
real meaning, both linguistic and spiritual, is "The
Children's Home."

That is what it is, a real home for children, where
everything is arranged for their best interests, where
the furniture is the right size for them, where there
are no adult occupations going on to be interrupted
and hindered by the mere presence of the children,
where there are no rules made solely to facilitate life
for grown-ups, where children, without incurring the
reproach (expressed or tacit) of disturbing their
elders, can freely and joyously, and, if they please,
noisily develop themselves by action from morning
to night With the removal by this simple means
of most of the occasions for friction in the life of
little children, it is amazing to see how few, how
negligibly few, occasions there are for naughtiness.
The great question of discipline which so absorbs us
all solves itself, melts into thin air, becomes non-

WHAT HAPPENS IN A CASA DEI BAMBINI 38

existent. Each child gives himself the severest sort
of self-discipline by his interest in his various under-
takings. He learns self-control as a by-product of
his healthy absorption in some fascinating pursuit,
or as a result of his instinctive imitation of older
children.

For instance, no adult was obliged to shout com-
mandingly to the little-girl waitress not to drop her
soup-tureen to brush the fly from her nose. She was
so filled with the pride of her responsible position
that she obeyed the same inner impulse towards
self-control which induces adult self-sacrifice. On the
other hand, the buttoning boy did not refrain by a
similar, violent effort of his will from snatching the
blocks from the arithmetical children. It simply
never occurred to him, so happily absorbed was he
in his own task.

I asked, of course, the question which obsesses
every new observer in a Children's Home, " But what
do you do, with all this fine theory of absolute free-
dom, when a child is naughty ? Sometimes, even if
not often, you surely must encounter the kicking,
screaming, snatching, hair-pulling, ' bad ' child ! " I
was told then that the health of such a child is
looked into at once, such perverted violence being
almost certainly the result of deranged physical con-
dition. If nothing pathological can be discovered,
he is treated as a morally sick child, given a little
table by himself, from which he can look on at the
cheerful, ordered play of the schoolroom, allowed any
3

34 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

and all toys he desires, petted, soothed, indulged,
pitied, but (of course this is the vital point) severely
let alone by the other children, who are told that he
is " sick " and so cannot play with them until he gets
well. This quiet isolation, with its object-lesson of
good-natured play among the other children, has an
hypnotically calming effect — the child's " naughtiness,"
for very lack of food to feed upon, or resistance to
blow its flames, disappears and dies away.

This, I say, was the explanation given me at first,
but later, when I came to know more intimately the
little group of Montessori enthusiasts in Rome, I
learned more about the matter. One of my
Montessori friends told me laughingly, " We found
that nobody would believe us at all when we told the
simple truth, when we said that we never, literally
never, do encounter that hypothetical, ferociously
naughty small child. They looked at us with such an
obvious incredulity that, for the honour of the system,
we had to devise some expedient. So we ransacked
our memories for one or two temporary examples of
1 badness ' which we met at first before the system
was well organized, and remembered how we had
dealt with them. Now, when people ask us what we
do when the children begin to scratch and kick each
other, instead of insisting that children as young
as ours, when properly interested, never do these
things, we tell them the old story of our device of
years ago."

I have said that the real translation for Casa dei

WHAT HAPPENS IN A CASA DEI BAMBINI 85

Bambini is The Children's Home, and I feel like in-
sisting upon this rendering, which gives us so much
more idea of the character of the institution. At
least, in this book, that English phrase will be used
from time to time to designate a Montessori school.
It is, for instance, their very own home, not only
in the sense that it is a place arranged specially
for their comfort and convenience, but further-
more a place for which they feel that steadying
sense of responsibility which is one of the greatest
moral advantages of a home over a boarding-house —
a moral advantage of home life which children in
ordinary circumstances are rarely allowed to share
with their elders. They are boarders (though gra-
tuitous ones) with their father and mother, and, as a
natural consequence, they have the remote, detached,
unsympathetic aloofness from the problem of running
the house which is characteristic of the race of
boarders.

In the Casa dei Bambini this is quite different.
Because it is a home and not a school, the hours are
very long, practically all the day being spent there.
The children have the responsibility not only for
their own persons, but for the care of their Home.
They arrive early in the morning and betake them-
selves at once to the small washstands, with pitchers
and bowls of just the size convenient for them to
handle. Here they make as complete a morning
toilet as anyone could wish, washing their faces,
necks, hands, and ears (and behind the ears !), brush-

86 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

ing their teeth, making manful efforts to comb their
hair, cleaning their finger-nails with scrupulous care,
and helping each other with fraternal sympathy. It
is astonishing (for anyone who had the illusion that
she knew child-nature) to note the contrast between
the vivid, purposeful attention they bestow on all
these processes when they are allowed to do them
for themselves, and the bored, indifferent impatience
we all know so well when it is our adult hands which
are doing all the work. The big ones (of five and
six) help the little ones, who, eager to be " big ones "
in their turn, struggle to learn as quickly as possible
how to do things for themselves.

After the morning toilet of the children is finished,
it is the turn of the schoolroom. The fresh-faced,
shining-eyed children scatter about the big room,
with tiny brushes and dust-pans and little brooms.
They attack the corners where dust lurks, they dust
off all the furniture with soft cloths, they water the
plants, they pick up any litter which may have ac-
cumulated, they learn the habit of really examining
a room to see if it is in order or not. One natural
result of this daily training in close observation of a
room is a much greater care in the use of it during
the day, a result the importance of which can be
certified by any mother who has to " pick up " after
a family of small children.

After the room is fresh and clean, the "order of
exercises " is very flexible, varying according to cir-
cumstances, the weather, the desire of the children.

WHAT HAPPENS IN A CASA DEI BAMBINI 37

They may perhaps sing a hymn together before dis-
persing to their different self-chosen exercises with
the apparatus. Sometimes the teacher gives them
some exercises in manners ; showing them how to rise
gracefully and quietly from their little chairs ; how
to say " Good morning " ; how to give and receive
politely some object ; how to carry things safely across
the room, etc. Sometimes they all sit about the
teacher and have a talk with her — an exercise in
ordinary well-bred conversation which is sadly needed
by our American children, who are seldom, at least
as young as this, trained to express themselves in
any but trivial requests, or, as in the kindergarten, in
repeating stories. The teacher questions the children
about the happenings of their lives, about anything
of more general interest which they may have
observed, or on any topic which excites a general
interest which they may have observed. Of course,
because she is a Montessori teacher, she does as little
of this talking as possible herself, confining herself
to brief remarks which may draw out the children.
Such conversation is of the greatest help to the
fluency and correctness of speech and to an early
enriching of the vocabulary, all important factors in
the release of the child from the prison of his baby
limitations. The habit of listening while others talk,
acquired in these general morning conversations, is
also of incalculable value, as is attested by the pro-
verbial rarity of the good listener even among adults.
Of course the main business of the day is the use

88

of the apparatus — the different Montessori exercises —
and these soon occupy the attention of all the chil-
dren. With intervals of outdoor play in the court-
yard garden, care of the plants there, the morning
progresses till the lunch hour, which has been de-
scribed. After this, or indeed whenever they feel
sleepy, the smaller children take their naps, and they
do not go home until five or six o'clock in the after-
noon, having at back of them a peaceful, harmonious
day, every instant of which has been actively, happily,
and profitably employed, and which has been full from
morning till night of goodwill and comradeship.

From time to time it happens that a new brother
or sister is introduced into this big family, with its
regime of perfect freedom from unnecessary restraint.
The behaviour of children who are brought into
the school after the beginning of the school-year is
naturally extremely various, since they are allowed
then, as always, to express with perfect liberty their
own individualities. Some join at once, of their
own accord, in one or another of the interesting
" games " they see being played by the other children
already initiated, and in half an hour are indis-
tinguishable from the older inhabitants of that little
world, drawing their fingers alternately over sand-
paper and smooth wood to learn the difference between
" rough " and " smooth," or delightedly matching the
different-coloured spools of silk. Others, naturally shy
ones, naturally reserved ones, those who have been
rendered suspicious by injudicious home treatment, or

WHAT HAPPENS IN A CASA DEI BAMBINI 39

those who have naturally slow mental machines, hold
aloof for a time. They are allowed to do this as long
as they please. They are welcomed once smilingly,
and then left to their own devices.

I remember, in the Via Giusti school, seeing for
several days in succession a tiny girl, not more than
three, with wide, shy, fawn eyes, sitting idle at a little
table, in the middle of the morning, with all her
wraps on. When I inquired the meaning of this very
unusual sight, the Directress told me that, apparently,
the child had something of the wild-animal terror of
being caught in a trap, and had indicated, terrified,
when her mother, on the first morning, tried to take
off her cap and cloak, that she wished to be free at
any moment to make her escape from these new and
untried surroundings. So her wraps were not re-
moved, she was allowed to sit near the door, which
was kept ajar, and not a look or gesture from the
Directress disturbed the reassuring isolation in which
that baby, by slow degrees, found herself and learned
her first lesson of the big world. I think she sat thus
for three whole days, at first starting nervously if
anyone chanced to approach her, with the painful,
apprehensive glare of the constitutionally timid child,
but little by little conquering herself.

One day she reached over shyly for a buttoning-
frame, left on the next table by a child who had
wandered off to other joys. She sat with this some
time, looking about suspiciously to see if some adult
were meditating that condescending swoop of patron-

40 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

izing congratulation which is so offensive to the self-
respecting pride of a naturally reserved personality.
No one noticed her. Still glancing up with frequent
suspicious starts, she began trying to insert the but-
tons in the buttonholes, and then, by degrees, lost
herself, forgot entirely the tragic self-consciousness
which had embittered her little life, and with a real
" Montessori face," a countenance of ardent, happy,
self-forgetting interest in overcoming obstacles, she
set definitely to work. After a time, finding that her
cape impeded her motions, she flung it off, taking
unconsciously the step into which, three days before,
only superior physical force could have coerced her.

I watched her through the winter with much inter-
est, her reticent, self-contained nature always mark-
ing her off from the other little ones more or less,
and I rejoiced to see that all the natural manifesta-
tions of her differing individuality were religiously
respected by the wise Directress. It was not long
before she was trotting freely about the room choos-
ing her activities with lively delight, and looking on
with friendly, though never very intimate, interest at
the doings of the other children. But it was months
before she cared to join at all in enterprises under-
taken in common by the majority of the pupils, the
rollicking file, for instance, which stamped about
lustily in time to the music. She watched them,
half-astonished, half-disapproving, wholly contented
with her own permitted aloofness, like a slim little
greyhound watching the light-hearted, heavy-footed

WHAT HAPPENS IN A CASA DEI BAMBINI 41

antics of a litter of Newfoundland puppies. At least
one person who saw her thanked Heaven many times
that a kind Providence had saved her from well-
meaning adult efforts to make her over according
to the Newfoundland pattern. Hers was a rare in-
dividuality, the integrity of which was being pre-
served entire for the future leavening of an all-too-
uniform civilization. For although the Montessori
school furnishes the best possible practical training for
democracy, inasmuch as every child learns speedily,
first the joys of self-dependence and then the self-
abnegating pleasure of serving others, it is also
preparing the greatest possible amelioration of our
present-day democracy, by counteracting that bad,
but apparently not inevitable, tendency of democracy
to a dead level of uniform and characterless medio-
crity. The Casa 'dei Bambini proves in actual prac-
tice that even the best interests of the sacred majority
do not demand that powerful and differing individu-
alities be forced into a common mould, but only
guided into the higher forms of their own natural
activities.

This brief digression is an illustration of the way
in which every thoughtful observer in a Montessori
school falls from time to time into a brown study
which takes him far afield from the busy babies
before him. No greater tribute to the broadly human
and universal foundation of the system could be pre-
sented than this inevitable tendency in visitors to see
in the differing childish activities the unchaining of

42 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

great natural forces for good which have been kept
locked and padlocked by our inertia, our short-
sightedness, our lack of confidence in human nature,
and our deep-rooted and unfounded prejudice about
childhood, our instinctive, mistaken, harsh conviction
that it will be industrious, law-abiding, and self-
controlled only under pressure from the outside.

It must be admitted that there is one variety of
child who is the mortal terror of Montessori teachers.
This is not the violently insubordinate child, because
his violence and insubordination at home only in-
dicate a strong nature which requires nothing but
proper activities to turn it to powerful and energetic
life. No, what reduces a Montessori teacher to
despair is a child like one I saw in a school for the
children of the wealthy, a beautiful, exquisitely at-
tired little fairy of four, whose lovely, healthful body
had been cared for with the most scientific exactitude
by trained nurses, governesses, and nursemaids, and
the very springs of whose natural initiative and inven-
tion seemed to have been broken by the debilitating
ministrations of all those caretakers. It is significant
that the teacher of this school admitted to me that
she found her carefully-reared pupils generally more
listless, more selfish, harder to reach, and harder to
stimulate than poor children ; but the least prosperous
of us need not think that because we cannot afford
nursemaids our children will fare better than those
of millionaires, for one too devoted mother can equal
a regiment of servants in crushing out a child's

WHAT HAPPENS IN A CASA DEI BAMBINI 43

initiative, his natural desire for self-dependence, his
self-respect, and his natural instinct for self- education.
The great point of vantage of a Montessori school
over an ordinary school in dealing with these morally
starved children of too prosperous parents, is that it
catches them younger, before the pernicious habit of
passive dependence has continued long enough entirely
to wreck their natural instincts. Beside the beautiful
child of four with the sapped and weakened will-
power mentioned above was an equally beautiful, ex-
quisitely dressed little tot of just three, whose glow-
ing face of happy energy provided the most welcome
contrast to the saddening mental torpor of the older
child, who, though naturally in every way a normal
little girl, stood hopelessly apathetic before all the
fascinating lures to her invention which the Montes-
sori apparatus spread before her. The little girl of
three, without a word from the teacher, regulated
for herself a busy, profitable, happy life, getting
out one piece of apparatus after another, " playing "
with it until her fresh interest was gone, putting
it away, and falling with equal ardour upon some-
thing else. The older child regarded her with the
curious passive wonder of a Hindu when he sees us
Occidentals getting our fun out of dancing and
various active sports instead of reclining upon
pillows to watch other people paid thus to exert
themselves. She was given a choice of geometric
insets, and provided with coloured pencils and a
big sheet of paper, baits which not even an idiot

44 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

child can resist, and, sitting uninventive before this
delightful array, remarked with a polite indifference
that she was used to having people draw pictures
for her. The poor child had acquired the habit of
having somebody else do even her playing.

In the face of this melancholy sight, I was com-
forted by the teacher's hopeful assurance that the
child had made some advance since the beginning
of the school, and showed some signs that in-
tellectual activity was awakening naturally under
the well-nigh irresistible stimulus of the Montessori
apparatus.

One exception to the general truth that the children
in a Montessori school do not take concerted action
is the " lesson of silence." This is often mentioned
in accounts of the Casa dei Bambini, but it is so im-
portant that it may perhaps be here described again.
It originated as a lesson for one of the senses, hearing,
but though it undoubtedly is an excellent exercise for
the ears, it has a moral effect which is more impor-
tant. It is certainly to visitors one of the most im-
pressive of all the impressive sights to be seen in the
Children's Home.

One may be moving about between the groups of
busy children, or sitting watching their lively anima-
tion or listening to the cheerful hum of their voices,
when one feels a curious change in the atmosphere
like the hush which falls on a forest when the sun
suddenly goes behind a cloud. If it is the first time
one has seen this " lesson," the effect is startling. A

WHAT HAPPENS IN A CASA DEI BAMBINI 45

quick glance around shows that the children have
stopped playing as well as talking, and are sitting
motionless at their tables, their eyes on the black-
board, where in large letters is written " Silenzio "
(Silence). Even the little ones who cannot read
follow the example of the older ones, and not only sit
motionless, but look fixedly at the magic word. The
Directress is visible now, standing by the blackboard
in an attitude and with an expression of tranquillity
which is as calming to see as the meditative impas-
sivity of a Buddhist priest. The silence becomes more
and more intense. To untrained ears it seems abso-
lute, but an occasional faint gesture or warning
smile from the Directress shows that a little hand has
moved almost but not quite inaudibly, or a chair has
creaked.

At first the children smile in answer, but soon,
under the hypnotic peace of the hush which lasts
minute after minute, even this silent interchange of
loving admonition and response ceases. It is now
evident from the children's trance-like immobility that
they no longer need to make an effort to be motion-
less. They sit quiet, rapt in a vague brooding reverie,
their busy brains lulled into repose, their very souls
looking out from their wide, vacant eyes. This ex-
pression of utter peace, which I never before saw on
a child's face except in sleep, has in it something
profoundly touching. In that matter-of-fact modern
schoolroom, as solemnly as in shadowy cathedral
aisles, falls for an instant a veil of contemplation

46 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

between the human soul and the external realities of
the world.

And then a real veil of twilight falls to intensify
the effect. The Directress goes quietly about from
window to window, closing the shutters. In the en-
suing twilight the children bow their heads on their
clasped hands in the attitude of prayer. The Di-
rectress steps through the door into the next room,
and a slow voice, faint and clear, comes floating back,
calling a child's name :

"El...e...na!"

A child lifts her head, opens her eyes, rises as
silently as a little spirit, and with a glowing face of
exaltation, tiptoes out of the room, flinging herself
joyously into the waiting arms.

The summons comes again : " Vit . . . to . . . ri . . . o ! "

A little boy lifts his head from his desk, showing
a face of sweet, sober content at being called, and
goes silently across the big room, taking his place by
the side of the Directress. And so it goes on until
perhaps fifteen children are clustered happily about
the teacher. Then, as informally and naturally as it
began, the " game " is over. The teacher comes back
into the room with her usual quiet, firm step ; light
pours in at the windows ; the mystic word is erased
from the blackboard. The visitor is astonished to
see that only six or seven minutes have passed since
the beginning of this new experience. The children
smile at each other, and begin to play again, perhaps
a little more quietly than before, perhaps more gently,

WHAT HAPPENS IN A CASA DEI BAMBINI 47

certainly with the shining eyes of devout believers
who have blessedly lost themselves in an instant of
rapt and self-forgetting devotion.

And, in a sense, they too have been to church.
This modern scientific Roman woman-doctor, who
probably never heard of William Penn, has re-
discovered the mystic joys of his sect, and has
appropriated to her system one of the most beneficial
elements of the Quaker Meeting.

Before seeing this " lesson of silence " one does not
realize that there is a lack in the world of the Casa
dei Bambini. After seeing it one feels instantly that
it is an essential element, this brief period of perfect
repose from the mental activity which, though un-
stimulated, is practically incessant ; this brief excur-
sion away from all the restless, shifting, rapid things
of the world into the region of peace and calm and
immobility. And yet who of us, without seeing this
in actual practice, would ever have dreamed that little
children would care for such an exercise, would
submit to it for an instant, much less throw them-
selves into it with all the ardour of little Yogis, and
emerge from it sweeter, more obedient, calmed, and
gentler as from a tranquillizing prayer? Sometimes
once in a day is not enough for them, and later they
ask of their own accord to have this experience
repeated. Their pleasure in it is inexpressible. The
expression which comes over their little faces when,
in the midst of their busy play, they feel the first hush
fall about them is something never to be forgotten.

48 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

It makes one feel a sort of envy of these children
who are so much better understood than we were at
their age. And the fact that our own hearts are
somehow calmed and refreshed by this bath of silent
peace makes one wonder if we are not all of us still
children enough to benefit by many of the habits of
life taught there, to profit by the adaptation to our
adult existence of some of the principles underlying
this scheme of education for babies.

CHAPTER IV

SOMETHING ABOUT THE APPARATUS AND ABOUT
THE THEORY UNDERLYING IT

As I look at the title of this chapter before setting
to work on it, the sight of the word " Theory "
makes me apprehensively aware that I am stepping
down into very deep water without any great con-
fidence in my powers as a swimmer. But I recall
again the reflection which has buoyed me up more
than once in the composition of these unscientific im-
pressions, namely, that I am addressing an audience
no more scientific than I am, an audience of ordinary,
fairly well educated parents. Furthermore I am
convinced that my book can do no more valuable
service than if by the tentative incompleteness
of its account it drives every reader to the study of
Dr. Montessori's own carefully written treatise.

It is always, I believe, essential to an under-
standing of any educational system to comprehend
first of all the underlying principle before going on
to its adaptation to actual conditions. This adapta-
tion naturally varies as the actual conditions vary,
and should change in many details if it is to embody
4 49

50 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

faithfully under differing conditions the fundamental
principle. But the master idea in every system is
unvarying, eternal, and it should be stated, studied,
and grasped, before any effort is made to learn the
details of its practical application. A statement of
this fundamental principle will be found, in different
phrasings, several times in the course of this book,
because it is essential not only to learn it once, but
to bear it constantly in mind. Any attempt to use the
Montessori apparatus or system by anyone who does
not fully grasp or is not -wholly in sympathy with its
bedrock idea, results inevitably in a grotesque, tragic
caricature of the metliod, such a farcical spectacle as
we now see the attempt to Christianize people by
forcible baptism to have been.

The central idea of the Montessori system, on
which every smallest bit of apparatus, every detail
of technique rests solidly, is a full recognition of the
fact that no human being can be educated by
anyone else. He must do it himself or it is never
done. And this is as true at the age of three as at
the age of thirty ; even truer, for the man of thirty
is at least as physically strong as any self-proposed
mentor is apt to be, and can fight for his own right
to chew and digest his own intellectual food.

It can be readily seen how this dominating idea
changes completely the old-established conditions in
the schoolroom, turning the high light from the
teacher to the pupil. Since the child can really be
taught nothing by the teacher, since he himself must

THE APPARATUS AND THE THEORY 51

do every scrap of his own learning, it is upon the
child that our attention centres. The teacher should
be the all-wise observer of his natural activity, giving
him such occasional quick, light-handed guidance as
he may for a moment need, providing for him in the
shape of the ingenious Montessori apparatus stimuli
for his intellectual life and materials which enable him
to correct his own mistakes ; but, by no means, as
has been our old-time notion, taking his hand in hers
and leading him constantly along a fixed path, which
she or her pedagogical superiors have laid out
beforehand, and into which every childish foot must
be either coaxed or coerced.

We have admitted the entire validity of this theory
in physical life. We no longer send our children for
their outdoor exercise bidding them walk along the
street, holding to nurse's hand like little ladies and
gentlemen. If we can possibly manage it we turn
them loose with a sandpile, a jumping-rope, hoops,
balls, bats, and other such stimuli to their natural
instinct for vigorous body-developing exercise. And
we have a "supervisor" in our public playgrounds
only to see that children are rightly started in their
use of the different games, not at all to play every
game with them. We do this nowadays because we
have learned that little children are so devoted to
those exercises which tend to increase their bodily
strength that they need no urging to engage in them.
The Montessori child, analogously, is allowed and
encouraged to let go the hand of his mental nurse,

52 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

to walk and run about on his own feet, and an
almost endless variety of stimuli to his natural in-
stinct for vigorous mind-developing, intellectual
exercise is placed within his reach.

The teacher, under this system, is the scientific,
observing supervisor of this mental " playground "
where the children acquire intellectual vigour, in-
dependence, and initiative as spontaneously, joyfully,
and tirelessly as they acquire physical independence
and vigour as a by-product of physical play. We
have long realized that children do not need to be
driven by force or even persuaded to take the amount
of exercise necessary to develop their growing bodies.
Indeed the difficulty has been to keep them from
doing it so continuously as to interfere with our
sedentary adult occupations and tastes. We have
learned that all we need to do is to provide the
jumping-rope and then leave the child alone with
other children. The most passionately inspired peda-
gogue can never learn to skip rope for a child any
more than in after years he can ever learn the
conjugation of a single irregular verb for a pupil.
The learner must do his own learning, and, this
granted, it follows naturally that the less he is inter-
fered with by arbitrary restraint and vexatious, un-
necessary rules, the more quickly and easily he will
learn. An observation of the typical, joyfully busy
child in a Casa dei Bambini furnishes more than
sufficient proof that he enjoys acquiring mental as
well as physical agility and strength, and asks

THE APPARATUS AND THE THEORY 53

nothing better than a fair and unhindered chance
at this undertaking.

But even when this deep-laid foundation principle
of self- education has been grasped, all is not plain
sailing for the adventurer on the Montessori ocean.
A set of theories relating to such complicated organ-
isms as human beings cannot in the nature of things
be of primer-like simplicity. For my own con-
venience I very soon made two main divisions of
the different branches on which the Montessori
system is developed out of its central idea. One
division, the practical, is made up of theories based
on acute, scientific knowledge of the child's body,
his muscles, brain, and nerves, such as only a
doctor and a physiological psychologist combined
can have. The second division is made up of
theories based on the spiritual nature of man, as
disclosed by the study of history, by unbiased direct
observation of present-day society, and by that
divining fervour of enthusiastic reverence for the ele-
ment of perfectibility in human nature which has
always characterized founders of new religions.

This chapter is to be devoted to the narration of
what a person, neither a doctor nor a physiological
psychologist, was able to understand of the first
division.

I think the first point which struck me especially
was the insistence on the fact that very little children
have no greater natural interest than in learning
how to do something. We all know how much

54 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

more fascinating a place our kitchens seem to be
for our little children than our drawing-rooms. I
have heard this inevitable gravitation towards those
back regions of the house accounted for on the theory
the " children seem to like servants better than other
people. There seems to be some sort of natural
affinity between a child and a cook." One morning
spent in the Casa dei Bambini showed me the true
reason. Children like cooks and chambermaids
better than callers in the parlour, because servants
are always doing something imitable : and they like
kitchens and pantries better than drawing-rooms be-
cause the drawing-room is a museum full of objects,
interesting it is true, but enclosed in the padlocked
glass-case of the command " Now, don't touch ! "
while the kitchen is a veritable treasure-house of
Montessori apparatus.

The three-year-old child who, eluding pursuit from
the front of the house, sits down on the kitchen floor
with a collection of cookie-cutters of different shapes
in his lap, and amuses himself by running his fingers
around their edges, is engaged in a true " stereognos-
tic exercise," as it is alarmingly dubbed in scientific
nomenclature. If there is a closet of pots and pans,
and he has had time before he is dragged off to clean
clothes and the vacuity of adult-invented toys, to
fit the right covers to the pots and see which pan
goes inside which, he has gone through a " sensory
exercise for developing his sense of dimension." If
he is struck by the fact that the package of oatmeal,

THE APPARATUS AND THE THEORY 55

although so large, weighs less than a smaller bag of
salt, he has been initiated into a " baric exercise " ;
while if there are some needles of ice left on the floor
by a careless iceman, with these and a permitted dab-
bling in warm dishwater, he unconsciously invents
for himself a " thermic exercise." If the cook is in-
dulgent or too busy to notice, there may be added to
these interests the creative rapture to be evolved
from a lump of dough, or a fumbling attempt to
fathom the mysterious inwardness of a Dover egg-
beater.

I have heard it said of the Montessori method
that a system of education accomplished with such
simple everyday means could scarcely claim to be
either new or the discovery of any one person.
It seems to me that is like denying any novelty to
the discovery that pure air will cure consumption.
The pure air has always been there, consumptives
have had nothing to do but to breathe it to get well,
but the doctors who first drove that fact into our im-
pervious heads deserve some credit, and can certainly
claim that they were innovators with their descent
upon the stuffy sick-rooms and their command to
open the windows.

Children from time immemorial have always done
their best, struggling bravely against the tyranny of
adult good intentions, to educate themselves by train-
ing their senses in all sorts of sense exercise. They
have always been (generations of exasperated
mothers can bear witness to it !) " possessed " to

56 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

touch and handle all objects about them. What Dr.
Montessori has done is to appear suddenly like the
window-breaking doctors, and to cry to us, " Let
them do it ! " ; or rather, to suggest something better
for them to touch and handle, since it is neither
necessary nor desirable that one's three-year-old
should perfect his sense of form either on one's
cherished Sevres vase or on a more or less greasy
cooking-utensil. Nor has he that perverse fondness
for the grease of the kettle, or that wicked joy in the
destruction of valuable bric-a-brac which our muddle-
headed observation has led us to attribute to him.
Those are merely fortuitous, and for him negligible,
accompaniments to the process of learning how to
distinguish accurately different forms. Dr. Montes-
sori assures us, and proves her assertions, that his
sole interest is in the varying shapes of the utensils
he handles, and that if he is given cleaner, lighter
articles with more interesting shapes, he requires no
urging to turn to them from his greasy and heavy
pots and pans.

Bearing in mind, therefore, the humble and familiar
relatives of the Montessori apparatus to be found in
our own kitchens and dining-rooms, let us look at it
a little more in detail.

The button ing-frames have been described (page
14). One's invention can vary them nearly to in-
finity. In the Casa dei Bambini there are these
frames arranged for buttons and buttonholes, for
hooks and eyes, for lacings, patent snap-fasteners,

EXERCISES IN PRACTICAL LIKE

BUILDING "THE TOWER"

THE APPARATUS AND THE THEORY 57

ribbon-ends to tie, etc. The aim of this exercise
is so apparent that it is scarcely necessary to mention
it, except for the constant temptation of a child-
lover before the Montessori apparatus to see in it
only the most enchanting diversion for a child, which
amuses him, though so simply, far more than the
most elaborate of mechanical toys. But — and here is
where our wool-gathering wits must learn a lesson
from purposeful forethought — we should never forget
that there is no smallest item in the Montessori train-
ing which is intended merely to amuse the child. He
is given these buttoning-frames not because they fas-
cinate him and keep him out of mischief, but because
they help him to learn to handle, more rapidly than
he otherwise would, the various devices by which his
clothes and shoes are held together on his little
body. As for the profound and vitally important
reason why he should be taught and allowed as soon
as possible to dress himself, that will be treated in
the discussion of the philosophical side of this baby-
training (pages 128-41).

It is apparent, of course, that the blindfolded child
who was identifying the pieces of different fabrics
was training his sense of touch. The sight of this
exercise reminds the average person with a start of
surprise that he too was born with a sense of touch
which might have been cultivated if anyone had
thought of it ; for most of us, by the enormity of our
neglect of our five senses, reduce them, for all prac-
tical purposes, to two, sight and hearing, and dis-

58 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

trust any information which comes to us by other
means. Our complacency under this self-imposed
deprivation is astonishing. It is as if a man should
wear a patch over one eye because he is able to see
with one and thinks it not worth while to use two.
Now, it is apparent that our five senses are our only
means of conveying information to our brains about
the external world which surrounds us, and it is
equally apparent that, to act wisely and surely in the
world,' the brain has need of the fullest and most
accurate information possible. Hence it is a fore-
gone conclusion, once we think of it at all, that the
education of all the senses of a child to rapidity,
agility, and exactitude is of great importance, not at
all for the sake of the information acquired at the
time by the child, but for the sake of the five finely
accurate instruments which this education puts under
his control. The child who was identifying the
different fabrics was blindfolded to help him to con-
centrate his sense of touch on the problem and not
aid this sense or mislead it, as we often do, with
his sight.

It may be well here to set down a few facts about
the relative positions of the senses of touch and of
sight, facts which are not known to many of us, and
the importance of which is not realized by many who
happen to know them. Everyone knows, to begin
with, that a new-born baby's eyes, while physically
perfect, are practically useless, and that the ability to
see with them accurately comes very gradually. It

THE APPARATUS AND THE THEORY 59

seems that it comes much more gradually than the
people usually in charge of little children have ever
known, and that, roughly speaking, up to the age of
six, children need to have their vision reinforced by
touch if, without great mental fatigue, they are to get
an accurate conception of the objects about them.

It appears furthermore that, as if in compensation
for this slow development of vision, the sense of
touch is extraordinarily developed in young children
— in short, that the natural way for little ones to
learn about things is to touch them. Dr. Montessori
found that the finger-tips of little children are ex-
tremely sensitive, and she claims that there is no
necessity, granted proper training, why this valuable
faculty, only retained by most adults in the event
of blindness, should be lost so completely in later
life.

Now it is plain to be seen that we adults, with our
fixed habit of learning about things from looking at
them, have, in neglecting this means of approach to
the child-brain, been losing a golden opportunity.
If children learn more quickly and with less fatigue
through their fingers than through their eyes, why
not take advantage of this peculiarity — a peculiarity
which extends even more vividly to child-memory,
for it is established beyond question that a little
child can remember the " feel " of a given object
much more accurately and quickly than the look of
it. It is easy to understand, once this explanation
is given, the great stress that is laid in Montessori

60 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

training on the different exercises for developing
and utilizing the sense of touch.

One of the first things a child just admitted to a
Casa dei Bambini is taught is to keep his hands
scrupulously' clean, because we can " touch things
better" with clean finger-tips than with dirty ones.
And, of course, he is allowed to take the responsibility
of keeping his own hands clean, and encouraged to
do it by the presence of the little dainty washstands,
just the right height for him, supplied with bowl,
pitcher, etc., just the right size for him to handle.
The joy of the children in these simple little wash-
stands, and their deft, delighted, frequent use of
them is a reproach to us for not furnishing such an
easily secured amelioration in the life of every one
of our babies.

The education of the sense of touch, like all the
Montessori exercises for the senses, begins with a
few simple and strongly contrasting sensations, and
proceeds, little by little, to many only very slightly
differing sensations, following the growth of the
child's ability to differentiate. The child with clean
finger-tips begins, therefore, with the first broad
distinction between rough and smooth. He is taught
to pass his finger-tips lightly, first over a piece of
sandpaper, and then over a piece of smoothly polished
wood, or glossy enamelled paper, and is told briefly,
literally in two words, the two names of those two
abstract qualities.

Here, in passing, with the first mention of this

THE APPARATUS AND THE THEORY 61

sort of exercise, it should be stated that the children
are taught to make these movements of the hand
and all others like them always from left to right, so
that a muscular habit will be established which will
aid them greatly later when they come to " feel "
their letters, which are, of course, always written from
left to right.

The children are encouraged to keep their eyes
closed while they are " touching " things, because
they can concentrate their attention in this way.
And here another general observation should be
made : that in the Montessori language " touching "
does not mean the brief haphazard contact of hand
with object which we usually mean, but a systematic
examination of an object by the finger-tips such as a
blind person might make.

After the first broad distinction is learned between
rough and smooth, there are then to be conquered
all the intervening shades and refinements of those
qualities. The children take the greatest delight in
these exercises and almost at once begin to invent
new ones for themselves, "feeling" whatever materials
are near them and giving them their proper names,
or asking what their names are. It is as if their
little minds were suddenly opened, as our dully
perceptive adult minds seldom are, to the infinite
variety of surfaces in the world. They notice the
materials of their own dresses, the stuffs used in
upholstering furniture, curtains, dress fabrics, wood,
smooth and rough, steel, glass, etc., with exquisitely

62 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

fairy-light strokes of their sensitive little finger-tips,
which seem almost visibly to grow more discrimin-
ating.

The "technical apparatus" for continuing this
training is varied, but always simple. A collection
of slips of sandpaper of varying roughness to be
placed in order from fine to coarse by the child
(blindfolded or not as he seems to prefer) ; other
collections of bits of fabrics of all sorts to be
identified by touch only : of slips of cardboard,
enamelled or rough ; blotting-paper, writing-paper,
newspaper, etc. ; of objects of different shapes,
cubes, pyramids, balls, cylinders, etc., for the blind-
folded child to identify ; later on, of very small
objects like seeds of different shapes or sizes ; finally,
of any objects which the child knows by sight, his
playthings, articles around the house, to be recognized
by his touch only.

There is one result on the child's character of
this sort of exercise which Dr. Montessori does not
specifically mention, but which has struck me forcibly
in practical experimentation with it. I have found
that little hands and fingers trained by these
fascinating "games" to light, attentive, discriminating,
and unhurried handling of objects, lose very quickly
that instinctive childish violent but very uncertain
clutch at things, which has been for many genera-
tions the cause of so much devastation in the nursery.
Little tots of four, trained in this way, can be trusted
with glassware and other breakable objects, which

THE APPARATUS AND THE THEORY 63

would go down to certain destruction in the fitfully
governed hands of the average undisciplined child of
twelve. In other words, the child of four has fitted
himself by means of a highly enjoyable process to be,
in one more respect, an independent, self-respecting,
trustworthy citizen of his own world.

Of course all these different exercises are much
more entertaining when, like other fun-producing
" games," they are " played " with a crowd of other
children. Sometimes one child of a group is blind-
folded and, as our American children say," It," while
the others sit about, watching his identification of
more and more difficult objects, ready, all of them, for
a shout of applause at a success. Should he fail, there
is an instant laughing pounce on the coveted blindfold
and application of it to the child next in order, and
of course there are much more animation and jolly
laughter, the interest is keener, and the attention
more concentrated by the contact with other wits,
than can be the case with a single child, even with an
audience of the most sympathetic mother or aunt.
There is absolutely no adequate substitute for the
beneficial action and reaction of children upon one
another such as form such a considerable part of the
Montessori training in a Casa dei Bambini. On the
other hand, those of us who live, as we almost all do,
far from any variety of a Montessori school, can, with
the exercise of our ingenuity and mother-wit, arrange
a great number of more or less adequate temporary
expedients. A large number of the Montessori de-

64 A MONTESSORI MOTU&&

vices, if they were not called " sensory exercises,"
would be recognized as merely fascinating new games
for children. What is blind-man's buff but a " sen-
sory exercise for training the ear," since what the
person who is " It " does is to try to catch the slight
movements made by the other players accurately
enough to pursue and capture them ? Children have
another game called, for some mysterious reason of
childhood, " Still pond, no more moving ! ", a variety
of blind-man's buff, which trains still more finely the
sense of hearing, since the players are required to
stand perfectly still, and the one who is "It " must
detect their presence by such almost imperceptible
sounds as their breathing, or the rustling caused
by an involuntary movement. If Montessori herself
had invented this game, it could not be more per-
fectly devised for bodily control. Children who
wriggle about in ordinary circumstances without the
slightest capacity to control their bodies, even in
response to the sternest adult commands for quiet,
will stand in some strained position without moving a
finger, their concentration so intense that even their
breathing is light and inaudible. We must all have
seen children happily playing such games ; many of
us have spent hours and hours of our childhood over
them. Froebel used them and others like them plenti-
fully in his system ; there are all sorts of more or less
hit-or-miss imitations of them being constructed by
modern child-tamers ; but no one before this Italian
woman-doctor ever analysed them so that we plain

THE APPARATUS AND THE THEORY 65

unprofessional people could fully grasp their fascina-
tion for us — ever told us that children like them,
because they afford an opportunity to practise self-
control, and that similar games based on the same
idea that it Is " fun " to exercise one's different
senses in company or in competition with one's youth-
ful contemporaries, would be just as entertaining as
these self-invented games, handed down for untold
generations from one set of children to another. All
the varieties of blindfold sensory exercises are varia-
tions on the theme of blind-man's buff, which is so
perennially interesting to all children. Any small
group of young children, two or three little neighbours
come in to play, will with a little guidance at first
readily " play " any of the " tactile exercises " de-
scribed above (pp. 61-2) for hours on end, instead of
wrangling about the rocking-horse — a toy invented
for solitary or semi-solitary use. Any group of
children, collected anywhere for ever so short a
time, can be converted into a half-hour's Montessori
school, though as a rule the younger they are, the
better material they are, since they have not fallen
into bad mental habits.

The various exercises or " games " for exercising
the sense of touch, although not described here in all
the detail of their elaboration in the Casa dei Bambini,
can be elaborated from these suggestions as one's own,
or, what is more likely, the children's inventiveness
may make possible.

The definite education of taste and smell has not
5

66 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

been very much developed by Dr. Montessori, al-
though simple exercises have been successfully devised,
such as dropping on the tongue tiny particles of
substances, sweet, sour, salt, bitter, etc., making the
child rinse his mouth out carefully between each test.
Similar exercises with different-smelling substances
can be undertaken with blindfolded children, asking
them to guess what they are smelling. Dr. Montes-
sori lays no great stress on this, however, as the sense
of smell with children is not highly developed.

Practice in judging weight is given by the use of
pieces of wood of the same size but of different
weights, chestnut contrasted with oak, poplar-wood
with maple, etc., the child learning by slightly
lifting them up and down on the palm of his hand.
Later on, this can be varied by the use of any objects
of about the same size but of different weights, and
later still by single objects of weights dispropor-
tionate to their size, such as a bit of lead or a small
pillow.

The difference between these carefully devised exer-
cises and the haphazard, almost unconscious compari-
son by the child in the kitchen of the bag of salt
and the box of oatmeal, is a very good example of
the way in which Dr. Montessori has systematized and
ordered, graded and arranged the exercises which
every child instinctively craves. The average mother
with leisure to devote to her much-loved child calls
him away from the pantry-shelf where he may upset
the oatmeal-box or spill the salt, thus " getting into

THE APPARATUS AND THE THEORY 67

mischief," and leads him, with mistaken affection,
back to his toy animals. The luckier child of a
poorer, busier, or more indifferent mother, is allowed
to " mess round " in the kitchen until he makes him-
self too intolerable a nuisance. He goes through in
this way many valuable sense exercises, but he wastes
a great deal of his time in misdirected and futile
effort, and does, as a matter of fact, make a great
deal of trouble for his elders which is not at all a
necessary accompaniment to his own life, liberty, or
pursuit of information.

Dr. Montessori has neither led the child away from
his instinctively chosen occupations, nor left him in
the state of anarchic chaos resulting from his natural
inability to choose, among the bewildering variety
of objects in the world, those which are best suited
for his self-development. She has, so to speak, taken
out into the kitchen, beside the child, busy with his
self-chosen amusements, her highly trained brain,
stored with pertinent scientific information and she
has looked at him long and hard. As a result she is
able to show us, what our own blurred observation
never would have distinguished, just which elements,
in the heterogeneous mass of his naturally-preferred
toys, are the elements towards which the tendrils of
his rapidly-growing intellectual and muscular organism
are reaching.

CHAPTER V

DESCRIPTION OF THE REST OF THE APPARATUS
AND THE METHOD FOR WRITING AND READING

THE carefully-graded advance, from the simpler
to the harder exercises, which is so essential a part of
the correct use of the Montessori, as of all other
educational, apparatus, seems to most mothers con-
templating the use of the system a very difficult
feature. " How am I to know ? " they ask. " Which
exercise is the best one to offer a child to begin with,
how can I tell when he has sufficiently mastered that
so that another is needed, and how shall I select the
right one to go on with ? "

Perhaps the first answer to make to these questions
is the one which so often successfully solves Montessori
problems : " Have a little more trust in your child's
natural instincts. Don't think that a single mistake
on your part will be fatal. It will not hurt him if
you happen to suggest the wrong thing, if you do not
insist on it, for, left freely to himself, he will not pay
the least attention to anything that is not suitable for
him. Give him opportunity for perfectly free action,
and then watch him carefully!'

68

. r r V

APPARATUS, WRITING, READING 69

If he shows a lively spontaneous interest in a
Montessori problem, and devotes himself to solving
it, you may be sure that you have hit upon something
which suits his degree of development. If he goes
through with it rather easily and, perhaps, listlessly,
and needs your reminder to keep his attention on it,
in all probability it is too easy ; he has outgrown it,
he no longer cares to occupy himself with it, just as
you no longer care to jump rope, though that may
have been a passion with you at the age of eight.

If, on the other hand, he seems distressed at the
difficulties before him, and calls repeatedly for help
and explanation, one of three conditions is present.
Either the exercise is too hard for him, or he has
acquired already the bad habit of dependence on
others, in both of which cases he needs an easier
exercise ; or, lastly, he has simply had enough formal
" sensory exercises " for a while. It is the most
mistaken notion about the Montessori Children's
Home to conceive that the children are occupied
from morning to night over the apparatus of her
formal instruction. They use it exactly as long, or
as often, or as seldom, as they please, just as a child
in an ordinary nursery uses his ordinary toys. It
must be kept constantly in mind that the wonderful
successes attained by the Montessori schools in Rome
cannot be repeated by the mere repetition of sensory
exercises, thrust spasmodically into the midst of
another system, or lack of system, in child-training.
The Italian children of five or six, who have had two

70 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

or three years of Montessori discipline, and who are
such marvels of sweet, reasonable self-control, who
govern their own lives so sanely, who have accom-
plished such astonishing feats in reading and writing,
are the results of many other factors besides but-
toning-frames and geometric insets, important as
these are.

Perhaps the most vital of these other factors is
the sense of responsibility, genuine responsibility, not
the make-believe kind, with which we are too often
apt to put off our children when they first show their
touchingly generous impulse to share some of the
burdens of our lives. For instance, to take a rather
extreme instance, but one which we must all have
seen, a child in an ordinary home is allowed to pick
up a bit of waste-paper on the floor, after having had
his attention called to it, and is told to throw it into
the waste-paper basket. This action of mechanical
obedience, suitable only for a child under two years of
age, is then praised insincerely to the child's face as
an instance of " how much help he is to mother ! "

The Montessori child is trained, through his feeling
of responsibility for the neatness and order of his
schoolroom, to notice litter on the floor, just as any
housekeeper does, without needing to have her
attention called to it. It is her floor and her
business to keep it clean. And this feeling of re-
sponsibility is fostered and allowed every opportunity
to grow strong, by the sincere conviction of the
Montessori teacher that it is more important for the

SOLID GEOMETRICAL INSETS

APPARATUS, WRITING, READING 71

child to feel it, than for the floor to be cleaned with
adult speed. As a result of this long patience on
the part of the Directress, a child who has been
under her care for a couple of years will (to go on
with our chosen instance) pick up litter from the
floor and dispose of it as automatically as the mistress
of the house herself, and with as little need for the
goad either of upbraiding for neglect or praise
incommensurate with the trivial service. This is
an attitude in marked contrast to that of many of
our daughters who often attain high-school age
without acquiring this feeling, apparently perfectly
possible to inculcate if the process is begun early
enough, of loyal solidarity with the interests of the
household.

With this caution that a Montessori life for a little
child does not in the least mean his incessant occu-
pation with formal sensory exercises, let us again
take up the description and use of the apparatus.

The first thing which is given a child is usually
either one of the buttoning-frames (illustration facing
p. 68), or the " solid geometric insets." This latter
game with the formidable name is illustrated opposite,
page 70, where it is seen to resemble the set of
weights kept beside their scales by old-fashioned
druggists. No other Montessori exercise is more
universally popular with the smallest ones who enter
the Children's Home, and few others hold their
attention so long. This combines training for both
sight and touch, since, as an aid to his vision, the

72 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

child is taught to run his finger-tips round the
cylinder which he is trying to fit in, and then round
the edges of the holes. His finger-tips recognize the
similarity of size before his eyes do. This piece of
apparatus is, of course, entirely self-corrective, and
needs no supervision. When it becomes easy for a
child quickly to get all the cylinders into the right
holes, he has probably had enough of this exercise,
although his interest in it may recur from time to
time during many weeks.

One of the exercises which it is usual to offer him
next is the construction of the Tower. This game
could be played (and often is) with the nest of
hollow blocks which nearly every child owns, and it
consists of building a pyramid with them, the biggest
at the bottom, the next smaller on this, and so on to
the apex made by the tiniest one. This is to learn
the difference between big and small ; and, as the
child progresses in exactitude of vision, the game can
be varied by piling the blocks in confusion at one
side of the room and constructing the pyramid, a
piece at a time, at some distance away. This means
that when the child leaves his pyramid to go and get
the block needed next, he must " carry the size in
his eye," as the phrase runs, and pick out the block
next smaller by an effort of his visual memory.

The difference between long and short is taught
by means of ten squared rods of equal thickness, but
regularly varying length, the shortest one being just
one-tenth as long as the longest The so-galled

APPARATUS, WRITING, READING 73

Long Stair (illustration facing page 74) is constructed
by the child with these. This is perhaps the most
difficult game among those by which dimensions are
taught, and a good many mistakes are to be antici-
pated. The material is again quite self-corrective,
however, and little by little, with occasional silent
or brief reminders from the adult onlooker, the
child learns first to correct his own mistakes, and
then not to make them. Thickness and thinness are
studied with ten solids, brick-like in shape, all of the
same length, but of regularly varying thickness, the
thinnest one being one-tenth as thick as the biggest
one. With these the child constructs the Big Stair
(illustration facing page 74). Later on (considerably
later), when the child begins to learn his numbers,
these " stairs " are used to help him. The large
numbers, cut out of sandpaper and pasted on smooth
cardboard, are placed by the child beside the right
number of red and blue sections on each rod of the
Long Stair.

After the construction of the Long and Big Stairs
the child is usually ready for the exercises with
different fabrics to develop his sense of touch, for
the first beginning of the exercises leading to writing,
especially the use of the strips of sandpaper pasted
upon smooth wood used to learn the difference
between rough and smooth. At the same time with
these exercises begin the first ones with colour, which
consist of simply matching spools of identical colour,
two by two,

74 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

When these simple exercises of the tactile sense
have been mastered, the child is allowed to attempt
the more difficult undertaking of recognizing all
the minute gradations between smooth and rough,
between dark blue and light blue, etc.

The training of the eye to discriminate between
minute differences in shades is carried on steadily in
a series of exercises which result in an accuracy of
vision in this regard which puts most of us adults to
shame. These colour- games are played with silk
wound round flat cards, like those on which we
often buy our darning-cotton. There are eight main
colours, and under each colour eight shades, ranging
from dark to light. The number of games which can
be played with these is only limited by the ingenuity
of the Directress or mother, and, although most of
them are played more easily with a number of
children together, many are quite available for the
solitary "only child at home." He can amuse
himself by arranging his sixty-four bobbins in the
correct order of their colours, or he can later, as in
the pyramid-making game, pile them all on one side
of the room, and make his graduated line at a
distance, "holding the colour" in his mind as he
crosses the room, a feat which almost no untrained
adult can accomplish ; although it is surprising what
results can be obtained any time in life by conscious,
definite effort to train one of the senses. There is
nothing miraculous in the results obtained in the
Ca,sa dei Bambini. They are the simple, natural

75

consequences of definite, direct training, which is
so seldom given. The remarkable improvement in
general acuteness of his vision, after training his
eyes to follow the flight of bees, has been picturesquely
and vigorously recorded by John Burroughs ; and
all of us know how many more chestnuts we can see
and pick up in a given time, after a few hours'
concentration on this exercise, than when we first
began to look for them in the grass.

The colour-games played by a number of children
together with the different-coloured spools are various,
but resemble more or less the old-fashioned game
of " authors." One of them is played thus. Eight
children choose each the name of a colour. Then the
sixty-four spools are poured out in confusion on the
table around which the children sit. One of them
(the eldest, or one chosen by lot) begins to deal out
to the others in turn. That is, the one on his right
asking for red, the dealer must quickly choose a spool
of the right colour and hand it to his neighbour.
Then the child beyond asks for blue, and so it goes
until the dealer makes a mistake. When he does,
the deal goes to the child next him. After every
child has before him in a mixed pile the eight shades
of his chosen colour, they all set to work as fast as
they can to see who can soonest arrange them in the
right chromatic order. The child who does this first
has " won " the game, and is the one who deals first
in the next game. Children of about the same age
and ability repeat this game with the monotonously

76 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

eternal vivid interest which characterizes an old-
established quartet of whist-players, and they attain,
by means of it and similar games with the colour
spools, a control of their eyes which is a marvel and
which must for ever add to the accuracy of their
impressions about the world. When a generation of
children trained in this manner has grown up, land-
scape painters will no longer be able to complain,
as they do now, that they are working for a purblind
public.

We are now approaching at last the extremely im-
portant and hitherto undescribed " geometric insets,"
whose mysterious name has piqued the curiosity of
more than one casual and hasty reader of accounts
of the Montessori system. A look at the pictures
of these shows them to be as simple as all
the rest of Dr. Montessori's expedients. Anyone
who was ever touched by the picture-puzzle craze,
or who in his childhood felt the fascination of dis-
sected maps, needs no explanation of the pleasure
taken by little children of four and five in fitting
these queer-shaped bits of wood into their corre-
sponding sockets, the square piece into the square
socket, the triangle into the three-cornered hole, the
four-leafed clover shape into the four-lobed recess.
There can be no better description of the way in
which a child is initiated into the use of this piece
of apparatus than the one written by Miss Tozier
for McClures Magazine :

" A small boy of the mature age of four, who has

APPARATUS, WRITING, READING 77

been sitting plunged either in sleep or meditation,
now starts up from his chair and wanders across to
his Directress for advice. He wants something to
amuse him. She takes him to the cupboard, throws
in a timely suggestion, and he strolls back to his
table with a smile. He has chosen half a dozen or
more thin, square tablets of wood and a strip of
navy-blue cloth. He begins by spreading down the
cloth, then he puts his blocks on it in two rows.
They are of highly-varnished wood, light blue, with
geometrical figures of navy-blue in the centre ; there
is a triangle, a circle, a rectangle, an oval, a square,
an octagon. The teacher, who has followed him,
stands on the other side of the table. She runs two
of her fingers round one of the edges of the triangle.
' Touch it so,' she says. He promptly and de-
lightedly imitates her. She then pulls all the figures
out of their light-blue frames by means of a brass
button in each, mixes them up on the table, and
tells him to call her when he has them all in place
again. The dark-blue cloth shows through the empty
frame, so that it appears as if the figures had only
sank down half an inch. While he continues to stare
at this array, off goes the teacher.

" ' Is she not going to show him how to begin ? '
" ' An axiom of our practical pedagogy is to aid
the child only to be independent,' answers Dr. Mon-
tessori. ' He does not wish help.'

" Nor does he seem to be troubled. He stares a
while at his array of blocks ; yet his eye does not

78 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

grow quite sure, for he carefully selects an oval from
the mixed-up pile and tries to put it in the circle.
It won't go. Then, quick as a flash, as if subcon-
sciously rather than designedly, he runs his little
forefinger around the rim of the figure and then
round the edge of the empty space left in the light-
blue frames of both the oval and the circle. He
discovers his mistake at once, puts the figure into
its place, and leans back a moment in his chair to
enjoy his own cleverness before beginning with
another. He finally gets them all into their proper
frames, and instantly pulls them out again, to do it
quicker and better next time.

" These blocks with the geometric insets are among
the most valuable stimuli in the Casa dei Bambini.
The vision and the touch become, by their use, accus-
tomed to a great variety of shapes. It will be noted,
too, that the child apprehends the forms synthetically,
as given entities, and is not taught to recognize them
by aid of even the simplest geometrical analysis.
This is a point on which Dr. Montessori lays par-
ticular stress."

Now it is to be borne in mind that, although, for
the children, this is only a " game," as fascinating to
them as the picture-puzzle is to their elders, their far-
seeing teacher is utilizing it to begin to teach them
to write. And here I realize that I have at last
written a phrase for which my bewildered reader
has probably been waiting. For of all the profound,
searching, regenerating effects of the Montessori

INSETS WHICH THE CHILD LEARNS TO PLACK I5OTH BY
SIGHT AND TOUCH.

APPARATUS, WRITING, READING 79

system, none seems to have made an impression on
the public like the fact, almost a by-product of the
method, that Montessori children learn to write and
read more easily than others. I have heard Dr.
Montessori exclaim in wonder many times over
the popular insistence on that interesting and im-
portant, but by no means central, detail of her work ;
as though reading and writing were our only functions
in life, as though we could get information and edu-
cation only from the printed page, a prop which is
already, in the opinion of many wise people, too largely
used in our modern world as a substitute for first-
hand, individual observation.

It cannot be denied, however, that the way Montes-
sori children learn to write is very striking. The
theory underlying it is far too complicated to describe
in complete detail in a book of this sort, but for the
benefit of the person who desires to run and read
at the same time, I will set down a brief, un-
scientific explanation.

The inaccuracy and relative weakness of a little
child's eyesight, compared to his sense of touch, have
been already mentioned (pages 58-9). This simple
element in child physiology must be borne constantly
in mind as one of the determining factors in the
Montessori method of teaching writing. The child
who is " playing " with the geometric insets soon
learns, as we have seen from Miss Tozier's descrip-
tion, that he can find the shallow recess which is the
right shape for the piece of wood which he holds in

80 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

his hand, if he will run the fingers of his other hand
around the edge of his piece of wood and then around
the different recesses.

It is hard for an ordinary adult really to conceive
of the importance of this movement for a little child.
Indeed, so fixed is our usual preference for vision as
a means of gaining information, that it gives one a
very queer feeling to watch a child, with his eyes
wide open, apparently looking intently at the board
with its different-shaped recesses, but unable to find
the one matching the inset he holds, until he has
gone through that eerie, blind-man's motion with his
finger-tips.

Now that motion, very frequently repeated, not
only tells him where to fit in his inset, but, like all
frequently repeated actions, wears a channel in his
brain which tends, whenever he begins the action,
to make him complete it in the same way he always
has done it. It can be seen that if, instead of a
triangle or a square, the child is given a letter of
the alphabet and shown how to follow its outlines
with his fingers in the direction in which they
move when the letter is written, the brain-channel
and muscular habit resulting are of the utmost
importance.

But before he can make any use of this, he needs
to learn another muscular habit, quite distinct from
(although associated with) the mastery of the letters
of the alphabet, namely, the mastery of the pencil.
The exceeding awkwardness naturally felt by the

APPARATUS, WRITING, READING 81

child in holding this new implement for the first time
has nothing to do with his recognition of A or B,
although it adds another great difficulty to his repro-
ducing those letters. He must learn how to manage
his pencil before he engages upon the much more
complicated undertaking of constructing with it
certain fixed symbols, just as he must learn how to
walk before he can be sent on an errand. The old-
fashioned way (still generally in use in Italy, and
not wholly abandoned in all parts of our own
country) was to force the child to fill innumerable
copy-books with monotonous straight lines or " pot-
hooks," a weariness of the spirit and a thorn in the
flesh which anyone who has suffered from it can
describe feelingly. One way adopted by modern
educators to avoid this dreary exercise is by frankly
running away from the issue and postponing teaching
children to write until a much more mature age than
formerly, in the hope that general exercises in free-
hand drawing will sufficiently supplement the general
strengthening and steadying of the muscles which
come with more mature development. It is an in-
accurate but, perhaps, suggestive comparison to say
that this is a little as though young children should
not be taught how to walk because it is so hard for
them to keep their balance, but made to wait until
all their bones are mature.

Dr. Montessori has solved the difficulty by another
use of the geometric insets. This time it is the hole
left by the removal of one of the insets which is used.
6

82 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

Suppose, for instance, that one chooses the triangular
inset. It is set down on a piece of paper and the
triangle is lifted out, leaving the paper showing
through. The child is provided with coloured
crayons and shown how to trace around the outline
of the triangular-shaped piece of paper. The fact
that the metal frame stands up a little from the
paper prevents his at first wildly unsteady pencil
from going outside the triangle. When he has
traced around the outline1 with his blue crayon, he
lifts the frame up and there is the most beautiful
blue triangle, all the work of his own hands ! He
usually gazes at this in surprised ecstasy, and then
it is suggested to him to fill in this outline with
strokes of his pencil. He is allowed to make these
as he chooses, only being cautioned not to pass
outside the line. At first the crayon goes "every
which way," and the drawings are hardly recognizable,
because the outline has been so overrun at every
point ; but gradually the child's muscular control is
improved, and finally carried to a very high degree
of perfection. Regular, even parallel lines begin to
appear, and the final result is as even as a Japanese
colour-wash. It is evident that in the course of this
work he makes, of his own accord, with the utmost
interest animating each stroke, as many lines as
would fill hours and hours of enforced drudgery over
copy-books. When, after much practice, the muscles

1 At first he traces only the outline of the inside figure.
Later, the square frame is also outlined.

APPARATUS, WRITING, READING 83

have learnt almost automatically to control fingers
holding a pencil, that particular muscular habit is
sufficiently well learned for the child to begin on
another enterprise.

Now, of course, though it is most interesting to
colour triangles and circles, a child does not spend
all his day at it. Among other things which occupy
and amuse him at this time is getting acquainted
with the look and feel of the letters of the alphabet.
The children are presented, one at a time, sometimes
only one a day, with large script letters, made of
black sandpaper pasted on smooth white cards, and
are taught how to draw their fingers over the letter
in the direction taken when it is written. At the
same time the teacher repeats slowly and distinctly
the sound of the letter, making sure that the child
takes this in.

After this, the little Italian child, happy in the
possession of a phonetically spelled language, has an
easier time than our English-speaking children, who
begin then and there their lifelong struggle with the
insanities of English spelling. But this is a struggle
to which they must come under any system, and
which is much less formidable under this than any
other. For the next step is, of course, to put these
letters together into simple words. There is no need
to wait until a child has toiled all through the alpha-
bet before beginning this much more interesting
process. As soon as he knows two letters he can
spell " Mamma." There is no question as yet of his

84 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

constructing the letters. He simply takes them from
their separate compartments and lays them on the
floor or table in the right order. In handling them
the children are encouraged constantly to make that
blind-man's motion of tracing the letter. The rough
sandpaper apparently shouts out information to the
little finger-tips sensitized by the tactile exercises, for
the child nearly always corrects himself more surely
by touching than by looking at his sandpaper
alphabet. Of course, the strongest of muscular habits
is being formed as he does this.

A pleasant variation on this routine is a test of
the child's new knowledge. The teacher asks him
to give her B, give her D, P, M, etc. The letters are
kept in little pasteboard compartments, a compart-
ment for all the B's, another for all the D's, and so
on. The child, in answer to the teacher's request,
looks over these compartments and picks out from
all the others the letter she has asked for. This, of
course, seems only like a game to him, a variation
on hide-and-seek.

All these processes go on day after day, side by
side, all invisibly converging towards one end. The
practice with the crayons, the recognition of the
letters by eye and touch, the revelation as to the
formation of words with the movable alphabet, are
so many roads leading to the painless acquisition of
the art of writing. They draw nearer and nearer
together, and then, one day, quite suddenly, the
famous " Montessori explosion into writing " occurs.

APPARATUS, WRITING, READING 85

The teacher of experience can tell when this explosion
is imminent. First the parallel lines which the child
makes to fill and colour the geometric figures become
singularly regular and even ; second, his acquaintance
with the alphabet becomes so thorough that he recog-
nizes the letters by sense of touch' only; and, third,
he increases in facility for composing words with the
movable alphabet. The burst into spontaneous writ-
ing usually comes only after these three conditions
are present.

It usually happens that a child has a crayon in
his hand and begins the motion of his fingers made as
he traces round one of his sandpaper letters. But
this time he has the pencil in his fingers, and the
idea suddenly occurs .to him, usually reducing him to
breathless excitement, that if he traces on the paper
with his pencil the form of the letters, he will be
writing. In the twinkling of an eye it is done. He
has written with his own hand one of the words which
he has been constructing with the movable alphabet.
He is usually as proud of this achievement as though
he had invented the art of writing. The first children
who were taught in this manner and who experienced
this explosion into writing did really believe, I
gather, that writing was something of their own
invention. They rushed about excitedly to explain
to anyone who would listen, all about this wonderful
new discovery : " Look ! Look ! You don't need the
movable letters to make words. See, you just take
a pencil or a piece of chalk, and draw the letters for

86 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

yourself ... as many as you please . . . any-
where ! " And, in fact, for the first few days after
this explosion, their teachers and mothers found
writing "anywhere!" all over the house. The
children were in a fever of excited pride. Since then,
although the first word always causes a spasm of joy,
children in a Children's Home are so used to seeing
the older ones writing and reading, that their own
feat is taken more calmly, as a matter of course. It
really always takes place in this sudden way, how-
ever. One day a child cannot write, and the next
he can.

The formation of the letters, so hard for children
taught in the old way, offers practically no difficulty
to the Montessori child. He has traced their outline
so often with his finger-tips that his knowledge of
them is lodged where, in his infant organism, it be-
longs, in his muscular memory ; so that when, pencil
in his well-trained hand, he starts his fingers upon an
action already so often repeated as to be automatic,
muscular habit and muscular memory do the rest.
He does not need consciously to direct each muscle
in the action of writing, any more than a practised
piano-player thinks consciously of which finger goes
after which. The vernacular phrase expressing this
sort of involuntary muscular memory facility is
literally true in his case, " He has done it so often
that he could do it with his eyes shut." It is to be
noted that for a long time after this explosion into
writing, the children continue incessantly to go

APPARATUS, WRITING, READING 87

through the three preparatory steps, tracing with
their ringers the sandpaper letters, filling in the
geometric form, and composing with the movable
alphabet. These are for them what playing scales
is to the pianist, a necessary practice for " keeping
the hand in." By means of constantly tracing the
sandpaper letters the children write almost from the
first the most astonishingly clear, firm, regular hand,
much better than that of most adults of my ac-
quaintance.

It is apparent, from even this short-hand account
of this remarkably successful method, that children
cannot learn to write by means of it without con-
siderable (even if unconscious and painless) effort on
their part, and without intelligence, good judgment,
and considerable patience on the part of the teacher.
The popular accounts of the miracles accomplished
by Dr. Montessori's apparatus have apparently led
some readers to fancy that it is a sort of amulet
one can tie about the child's neck, or plaster to
apply externally, which will cause the desired effect
without any further care. As a matter of fact, it is
a carefully devised trellis which starts the child's
sensory growth in a direction which will be profitable
for the practical undertaking of learning how to
write, a trellis invented and patented by Dr. Mon-
tessori, but which those of us who attempt to teach
children must construct for ourselves on her pattern,
following step by step the development of each of
the children under our care.

88 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

And yet, although the Montessori apparatus does
not teach children by magic how to write a good
hand, in comparison with the methods now in use, it is
really almost miraculous in its results. In our schools
children learn slowly to write (and how badly !) when
they are seven or eight, cannot do it fluently until
they are much older, and never do it very well, if the
average handwriting of our high-school and college
student is any test of our system. In the Montessori
schools a child of four usually spends about a month
and a half in the definite preparation for writing, and
children of five usually only a month. Some very
quick ones of this age learn to write with all the
letters in twenty days. Three months' practice, after
they once begin to write, is, as a rule, enough to
steady their handwriting in an excellently clear and
regular script, and, after six months of writing, a
Montessori tot of five can write fluently, legibly, and
(most important and revolutionary change) with
pleasure, far beyond that usually felt by a child in,
say, our third or fourth grades.

He has not only achieved this valuable accomplish-
ment with enormous economy of time, but he has
been spared, into the bargain, the endless hours of
soul-killing drudgery from which the children in our
schools now suffer. The Montessori child has, it is
true, gone through a far more searching preparation
for this achievement, but it has all been without any
strain on his part, without any consciousness of effort
except that which springs from the liveliest spon-

APPARATUS, WRITING, READING 89

taneous desire. It has tired him, literally, no more
than as if he had spent the same amount of time
playing tag.

I have heard some scientific talk which sounded to
my ignorant ears very profound and psychological,
about whether this capacity of Montessori children
to write can be considered as a truly "intellectual
achievement," or only a sort of unconsciously learned
trick. This is a fine theoretic distinction which I
think most mothers will feel they can safely ignore.
Whatever it is from a psychological standpoint, and
however it may be rated in the Bradstreet of pure
science, it is an inestimable treasure for our chil-
dren.

Reading comes after writing in the Montessori
system, and has not apparently as inherently close a
connection with it as is sometimes thought. That is,
a child who can form letters perfectly with his pencil
and can compose words with the movable alphabet
may still be unable to recognize a word which he
himself has neither written nor composed. But, of
course, with such a start as the Montessori system
gives him, the gap between the two processes is soon
bridged. There are various reasons why a detailed
account of the Montessori method of teaching read-
ing need not be given in this book. One is that it
is written for mothers and not teachers, and since
the methods for teaching reading in our own schools
are much better than those used for teaching writing,
mothers will naturally, as a rule, leave reading until

90 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

the child is under a teacher. Furthermore, there is
nothing so very revolutionary in the Montessori
method in this regard, and there exist already in
this country several excellent methods for teaching
reading. And yet a few notes on some features of
the Montessori system will be of interest.

Like many variations of our own system, it begins
with the recognition of single words. At first these
are composed with the movable alphabet. Later,
when the child can interpret readily words composed
in this way, they are written in a large clear script
on slips of paper. The child spells the word out
letter by letter, and then pronounces these sounds
more and more rapidly until he runs them together
and perceives that he is pronouncing a word familiar
to him. This is always a moment of great satis-
faction to him and of encouragement to his teacher.

After this has continued until the children recog-
nize single words quickly, the process is extended to
phrases. Here the teacher goes very slowly, with
great care, to avoid undue haste and lack of thorough-
ness. There is a danger here that the children will
fall into the mechanical habit (familiar to us all) of
reading aloud a page with great glibness, although
the sense of the words has made no impression on
their minds. To avoid this the Montessori Directress
adopts the simple expedient of not allowing them at
first to read aloud. She carries on, instead, a series
of silent conversations with the children, writing on
the board some simple request for an action on their

APPARATUS, WRITING, READING 91

part— "Please stand up," "Please shut your eyes,"
and so on. Later, longer and more complicated
sentences are written on slips of paper and distributed
to the children. They read these to themselves (not
being misled by their oral fluency into thinking they
understand what they do not), and show that they
have understood by performing the actions requested.
In other words, these are short letters addressed by
the teacher to the children, and answered by silent
action on the part of the children. Like all of the
Montessori devices, this is self-corrective. It is per-
fectly easy for the child to be sure whether he has
understood the sentence or not, and his attention is
fixed, not on pronouncing correctly (which has
nothing to do with understanding the sentences be-
fore him), but on the comprehension of the written
symbols. As for the teacher, she has an absolutely
perfect check on the child. If he does not under-
stand, he does not do the right thing. It means the
elimination of the " fluent bluffer," a phenomenon not
wholly unfamiliar to teachers, even when they are
dealing with very young children.

CHAPTER VI

SOME GENERAL REMARKS ABOUT THE MONTESSORI
APPARATUS IN THE HOME

THE first thing to do, if you can manage it, is to
secure a set of the Montessori apparatus. It is the
result of the ripest thought, ingenuity, and practical
experience of a gifted specialist who has concentrated
all her forces on the invention of the different devices
of her apparatus. But there are various supplemen-
tary statements to be made which modify this simple
advice.

One is, that the arrival in your home of the box
containing the Montessori apparatus means just as
much for the mental welfare of your children as the
arrival in the kitchen of a box of miscellaneous
groceries means for their physical health. The
presence on the pantry-shelf of a bag of the best
flour ever made will not satisfy your children's hunger
unless you add brains and good judgment to it,
and make edible, digestible bread for them. There is
nothing magical or miraculous about the Montessori
apparatus. It is as yet the best raw material pro-
duced for satisfying the intellectual hunger of normal

THE APPARATUS IN THE HOME 93

children from three to six, but it will have prac-
tically no effect on them if its use is not regulated by
the most attentive care, supplemented by a keen and
never-ceasing objective scrutiny of the children who
are to use it. This is one reason why mothers find
it harder to educate their children by the Montessori
system (as by all other systems) than teachers do,
for they have an age-long mental habit of clasping
their little ones so close in their arms that, figuratively
speaking, they never get a fair square look at them.

This study of the children is an essential part of all
education, which Dr. Montessori is among the first
pointedly and definitely to emphasize. The neces-
sity for close observation of conditions before any
attempt is made to modify them is an intellectual
habit which is the direct result of the methods of
positive sciences, in the study of which she received
her intellectual training. Just as the astronomer
looks fixedly at the stars, and the biologist at the
protoplasm, before he tries to generalize about their
ways of life and action, so we must learn honestly
and wholeheartedly to try to see what sort of chil-
dren Mary and Bob and Billy are, as well as to love
them with all our might. This should not be, as it is
apt to be, a study limited to their moral character-
istics, to seeing that Mary's fault is vanity and
Bob's is indifference, but should be directed with the
most passionate attention to their intellectual traits
as well, to the way in which they naturally learn or
don't learn, to the doors which are open, and those

94 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

which are shut, to their intellectual interest. For
children of three and four have a life which it is no
exaggeration to call genuinely intellectual, and their
constant presence under the eyes of their parents
gives us a chance to know this, which helps to make
up for our lack of educational theory and experience
in which almost any teacher outstrips us.

There are no two plants, in all the infinity of
vegetable life, which are exactly alike. There are
not, so geologists tell us, even two stones precisely
the same. To lump children (even two or three chil-
dren closely related) in a mass, with generalizations
about what will appeal to them, is a mental habit
that experience constantly and luridly proves to be
the extremest folly. This does not mean individu-
alism run wild. There are some general broad prin-
ciples which hold true of all plants, and which we shall
do well to learn from an experienced gardener. All
plants prosper better out of doors than in a cellar,
and all children have activity for the law of their
nature. But lilies-of-the-valley shrivel up in the
amount of sunshine which supplies just the right condi-
tions for nasturtiums, and your particular three-year-
old may need a much quieter (or more boisterous)
activity than his four-year-old sister. Neither of
them may be, at first, in the least attracted by the
problem of the geometric insets, or by the idea of
matching colours. They may not have reached that
stage, or they may have gone beyond it. You will
need all your ingenuity and your good judgment to

THE APPARATUS IN THE HOME 95

find out where they are intellectually, and what they
are intellectually. The Montessori rule is never to
try to force or even to coax a child to use any part
of the apparatus. The problem involved is explained
to him clearly, and if he feels no spontaneous desire
to solve it, no effort is made to induce him to under-
take it. Some other bit of apparatus is what, for the
moment, he needs, and one only wastes time in trying
to persuade him to feel an interest of which he is,
for the time, incapable.

If you doubt this, and most of us feel a lingering
suspicion that we know better than the child what he
wants, look back over your own school-life and con-
fess to yourself how utterly has vanished from your
mind the information forced upon you in a course
which did not arouse your interest. My own private
example of that is a course on " government." I was
an ordinarily intelligent and conscientious child, and
I attended faithfully all the interminable dreary
recitations of that subject, even filling a notebook
with selections from the teacher's remarks, and, at
the end of the course, passing a fairly creditable
examination. The only proof I have of all this is
the record of the examination and the presence
among my relics of the past of the notebook in my
handwriting ; for, among all the souvenirs of my
school-life, there is not one faintest trace of any know-
ledge about the way people are governed. I cannot
even remember that I ever did know anything about
it. My mind is a perfect, absolute blank on the

96 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

subject, although I can remember the look of the
schoolroom in which I sat to hear the lectures on it ;
I can see the face of the teacher as plainly as though
she still stood before me ; I can recall the pictures on
the wall, the very graining of the wood on my desk.
There is only no more recollection of the subject
than if the lectures had been delivered in Hindu-
stani. The long hours I spent in that classroom
are as wholly wasted and lost out of my all-too-short
life as though I had been thrust into a dark closet
for those three hours a week. Even the amount of
" discipline " I received, namely, the capacity to sit
still and endure almost intolerable ennui, would have
been exactly as great in one case as in the other, and
would have cost the State far less.

All of us must have some such recollection of our
school-life to set beside the vivifying, exciting, never-
to-be-forgotten hours when we first really grasped a
new abstract idea, or learned some bit of scientific
information thrillingly in touch with our own under-
standable lives ; and we need no other proof of the
truth of the maxim, stated by all educators, but
stated and constantly acted upon by Dr. Montessori,
that the prerequisite of all education is the interest
of the student. There is no question here to be dis-
cussed as to whether he learns more or less quickly,
more or less well, according as he is interested or not.
The statement is made flatly by the Italian educator
that he does not, he cannot learn anything, if he is
not interested. There is no use trying to call in the

THE APPARATUS IN THE HOME 97

old war-horse of " mental discipline " and say that it
is well to force him to learn whether he has an interest
in the subject or not, because the fact is that he
cannot learn without feeling interest ; and the appear-
ance of learning, the filled notebooks, the attended
recitations, the passed examinations, we all know in
our hearts to be but the vainest of illusions and to
represent only the most wasted hours of our youth.

Dr. Montessori, with her bold, consistent accept-
ance as a practical guide of conduct of a fact
which her reason tells her to be true, acts on
this principle with her usual whole-souled fervour.
If the children are not interested, it is the busi-
ness of the educator to furnish something which
will interest them (as well as instruct them) rather
than try to force their interest to centre itself on
some occupation which the educator has thought be-
forehand would meet the case.1 When we capture
and try to tame a little wild creature of unknown
habits (and is not this a description of each little new
child?) our first effort is to find some food which
will agree with him, and experimentation is always
our first resort. We offer him all sorts of things to

1 A note here may perhaps clear up a possible misconception.
It is to be remembered that all these statements about the neces-
sity for interest in the child's mind refer only to educative pro-
cesses. Occasions may arise when it is desirable that a child
shall do something which does not interest him — for instance, sit
still in a railway train until the end of the journey. But no one
need think that he will ever acquire a taste for this occupation
through being forced to it.

7

&8 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

eat, and observe which he selects. It is true that we
do make some broad generalizations from the results
of our experiences with other animals, and we do not
try to feed a little creature which looks like a wood-
chuck on honey and water, nor a new variety of moth
on lettuce-leaves. But even if the unknown animal
looks ever so close a cousin of the woodchuck family,
we do not try to force the lettuce-leaves down his
throat if, after a due examination of them, he shows
plainly that he does not care for them. We cast
about to see what else may be the food he needs ; and
though we may feel very impatient with the need for
making all the troublesome experiments with diet, we
never feel really justified in blaming the little creature
for having preferences for turnip-tops, nor do we have
a half-acknowledged conviction that, perhaps, if we
had starved him to eat lettuce-leaves, it might have
been better for him. We are only too thankful to
hit upon the right food before our little captive dies
of hunger.

Something of this is supposed to go through the
mind of the Montessori mother as she refrains from
arguing with her little son about the advisability of
his being interested in one, rather than another, of
the Montessori contrivances ; and these considerations
are meant to explain to her the prompt acquiescence
of the Montessori teacher in the child's intellectual
"whims." She is not foolishly indulging him to
save herself trouble, or to please him. She is
only trying to find out what his natural interest

THE APPARATUS IN THE HOME 99

is, so that she may utilize it for teaching him
without his knowing it. She is only taking ad-
vantage of her knowledge of the fact that water
runs downhill and not up, and that you may keep
it level by great efforts on your part, and even
force it to climb, but that you can only expect it to
work for you when you let it follow the course marked
out for it by the laws of physics. In other words, she
sees that her business is to make use of every scrap
of the children's interest, rather than to waste her
time and theirs trying to force it into channels where
it cannot run ; to carry her waterwheel where the
water falls over the cliff, and not to struggle to turn
the river back towards the watershed. And anyone
who thinks that a Montessori teacher has "an easy
time because she is almost never really teaching,"
underestimates grotesquely the amount of alert, keen
ingenuity and capacity for making fine distinctions
required for this new feat of educational engineering.
On the other hand, the advanced modern educators
who cry jealously that there is nothing new in all
this, that it is the principle underlying their own
systems of education, need only to ask themselves
why their practice is so different from that of the
Italian doctor, why a teacher who can force, coerce,
coax, or persuade all the members of a class of thirty
children to " acquire " practically the same amount
of information about a given fixed number of topics
within a given fixed period of time, is called a
" good " teacher ? They will answer inevitably that

100 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

chaos and anarchy in the educational world would
result from any course of study less fixed than that
in their schools. And an impartial observer, both
of our schools and of history, might reply that
chaos and anarchy have been prophesied every time
a more liberal form of government, giving more
freedom to the individual, has been suggested, any-
where in the world.

In any case the Montessori mother, with the newly
acquired apparatus spread out before her, needs to
gird herself up for an intellectual enterprise where
she will need not only all the strength of her brain,
but every atom of ingenuity and mental flexibility
which she can bring to bear on her problem. She
will do well, of course, to fortify herself in the first
place by a careful perusal of Dr. Montessori's own
description of the apparatus and its use, or by
reading any other good manual which she can find.
The booklet sent out with the apparatus gives some
very useful detailed instructions which it is not
necessary to repeat here, since it comes into the
hands of everyone who secures the apparatus. One
of the main things for the Montessori mother to
remember is that the teachers in the Casa dei
Bambini are trained to make whatever explanations
are necessary as brief as possible, given in as few
words as they can manage, and with good long
periods of silence in between.

Much of the apparatus is so ingeniously devised
that any normally inventive child needs but to have

THE APPARATUS IN THE HOME 101

it set before him to divine its correct use. The
buttoning-frames, and the solid and plane geometric
insets need not a single word of explanation, even to
start the child upon the exercise. But the various
rods and blocks, used for the Long and Broad Stairs
and the Tower, are so much like ordinary building-
blocks that, the first time they are presented, the
child needs a clear presentation of how to handle
them. This can be made an object-lesson conducted
in perfect silence ; although later, when the child
begins to use the sandpaper numbers with them as
he learns the series of numbers up to ten, he needs,
of course, to be guided in this exercise.

With these rods and blocks especially, care
should be taken to observe the Montessori rule
that apparatus is to be used for its proper purpose
only, in order to avoid confusion in the child's mind.
He should never use the colour-spools, for instance,
to build houses with. Not that, by any means, he
should be coaxed to continue the exercises in colour
if he feels like building houses ; but other material
should be given him — a pack of cards, building-
blocks, small stones, anything handy, but never
apparatus intended for another use.

In the exercises for learning the difference between
rough and smooth, the child needs at first a little
guidance in learning how to draw his finger-tips
lightly from left to right over the sandpaper strips; and
in the exercises of discrimination between different
fabrics, he needs someone to tie the bandage over

102 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

his eyes and, the first time, to show him how to set
to work.

A silent object-lesson, or a word or two, are needed
to show him how to separate and distinguish between
the pieces of wood of different weights in the baric
exercises, and a similar introduction is needed to the
cylindrical sound boxes.

As he progresses both in age and ability, and
begins some of the more complicated exercises, he
needs a little longer explanation and a little more
supervision to make sure that he has understood the
problem. In the later part of the work with plane
geometric insets, and in the work with coloured
crayons, he needs occasional supervision, not to correct
the errors he makes, but to see that he keeps the
right aim in sight. Of course, when he begins work
with the alphabet he needs more real " teaching," since
the names of the letters must be told him, and care
must be taken that he learns firmly the habit of
following their outlines in the right direction, of
having them right side up, etc. But throughout
one should remember that most " supervision " is
meddling, and that one does the child a real injury
in correcting a mistake which, with a little more
time and experience, he would have been able to
correct for himself. It is well to keep in mind, also,
that little children, some of them at least, have a
peculiarity shared by many of us adults — a nervous-
ness under even silent inspection. I know a land-
scape painter of real ability who is reduced almost to

THE APPARATUS IN THE HOME 103

nervous tears, and certainly to paralysed impotence,
by the staring spectators who are apt to gather
about a person sketching. Even though we may
refrain from actually interfering in the child's fumbling
efforts to conquer his own lack of muscular precision,
we may weigh on him nervously by too close an
attention to his efforts. The right thing is to show
him (if necessary) what to try to do, and then, if it
arouses his interest, to busy ourselves somewhat
ostentatiously with something else in the room.
Occasionally a child, even a little child, has acquired
already the habit of asking for help rather than
struggling with an obstacle himself. The best way
to deal with this unfortunate tendency is to provide
simpler and simpler exercises until, through making
a very slight effort " all himself," the child learns the
joy of self-conquest and reacquires his natural taste
for independence. Most of us, with healthy normal
children, however, meet with no trouble of this kind.
The average child of three, or even younger, set
before the solid geometric insets, clears the board
for action by the heartiest and most instinctive
rejection of any aid, suggestions, or even sympathy.
His cry of " Let me do it ! " as he reaches for the
little cylinders with one hand and pushes away his
would-be instructor with the other, does one's heart
good.

It is to be seen that Dr. Montessori's demand for
child-liberty does not mean unbridled and unregulated
licence for him, even intellectual licence; nor does her

104 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

command to her teachers to let him make his own
forward advance mean that they are to do nothing
for him. They may — indeed frequently they must-
set him carefully on a road not impossibly hard for
him, and head him in the right direction. What they
are not to do is to go along with him, pointing out
with a flood of words the features of the landscape,
smoothing out all the obstacles, and carrying him up
all the hills.

More important than any of the details in the
use of the apparatus is the constant firm intellectual
grasp on its ultimate purpose. The Montessori mother
must assimilate, into the very marrow of her bones,
the fundamental principle underlying every part of
every exercise, the principle which she must never
forget an instant in all the detailed complexity
of its ingenious application. She is to remember
constantly that the Montessori exercises are neither
games to amuse the children (although they do this to
perfection) nor ways for the children to acquire infor-
mation (although this is also accomplished admirably,
though not so directly as in the kindergarten work).
They are, like all truly educative methods, means to
teach the child how to learn. It is of no great impor-
tance that he shall remember perfectly the form of a
square or a triangle, or even the sacred cube of Froe-
belian infant-schools. It is of the highest importance
that he shall acquire the mental habit of observing
quickly and accurately the form of any object he
looks at or touches, because if he does, he will have.

THE APPARATUS IN THE HOME 105

as an adult, a vision which will be that of a veritable
superman, compared to the unreliable eyesight on
which his parents have had to depend for information.
It is of no especial importance that he shall learn
quickly to distinguish with his eyes shut that a piece
of maple the same size as a piece of pine is the heavier
of the two. It is of the utmost importance that he
shall learn to take in accurate information about the
phenomena of the world, by whichever sense is
most convenient, or by all of them at once, cor-
recting and supplementing each other as they so
seldom do with us ill-trained adults.

CHAPTER VII

THE POSSIBILITY OF ADAPTATIONS OF, OR ADDI-
TIONS TO, THE MONTESSORI APPARATUS

HOLDING firmly in mind the guiding principle
formulated in the paragraph preceding, it may not
be presumptuous for us, in addition to exercising our
children with the apparatus devised by Dr. Montes-
sori, to attempt to apply her main principles in ways
upon which she has not happened to hit. She her-
self would be the first to urge us to do this, since
she constantly reiterates that she has but begun
the practical application of her theories, and she
calls for the co-operation of the world in the task
of working out complete applications suitable for
different conditions.

It is my conviction that, as soon as her theories
are widely known and fairly well assimilated, she
will find, all over the world, a multitude of ingenious
co-partners in her enterprise, people who have been
for years quite unconscious of her existence, approxi-
mating her system, although never doing so systema-
tically and thoroughly. Is it not said that each new
religion finds a congregation ready-made of those

ADAPTATIONS OR ADDITIONS 107

who have been instinctively practising the as yet
unformulated doctrines ?

An incident in my own life which happened years
ago is an example of this. One of the children of
the family, an adored, delicate little boy of five, fell
ill while we were all in the country. We sent at once
in the greatest haste to the city for a trained nurse,
and while awaiting her arrival devoted ourselves to
the task of keeping the child amused and quiet in
his little bed. The hours of heart-sickening difficulty
and anxiety which followed can be imagined by any-
one who has, without experience, embarked on that
undertaking. We performed our wildest antics before
that pale, listless little spectator, we offered up our
choicest possessions for his restless little hands, we
set in motion the most complicated of his mechani-
cal toys ; and we quite failed either to please or to
quiet him.

The nurse arrived, cast one glance at the situa-
tion, and swept us out with a gesture. We crept
away, exhausted, beaten, wondering by what miracu-
lous tour de force she meant single-handed to
accomplish what had baffled us all, and holding our-
selves ready to secure for her anything she thought
necessary, were it the horns of the new moon. In a
few moments she thrust her head out of the door and
asked pleasantly for a basket of clothes-pins — just
common wooden clothes-pins.

When we were permitted to enter the room an hour
or so later, our little patient scarcely glanced at us.

108 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

so absorbed was he in the fascinatingly various angles
at which clothes-pins may be thrust into each other's
clefts. When he felt tired he shut his eyes and
rested quietly, and when returning strength brought
with it a wave of interest in his own cleverness, he
returned to the queer agglomeration of knobby wood
which grew magically under his hands. Now Dr.
Montessori could not possibly have used that " sen-
sory exercise," as they have no clothes-pins in Italy,
fastening their washed garments to wires, with knotted
strings : and the nurse was probably married with
children of her own before Dr. Montessori opened
the first Casa dei Bambini ; but that was a true
Montessori device, and she was a real " natural-
born " Montessori teacher. And I am sure that
everyone must have in his circle of acquaintances
several persons who have such an intuitive under-
standing of children that Dr. Montessori's arguments
and theories will seem to them perfectly natural and
axiomatic. One of my neighbours, the wife of a farmer,
a plain Yankee woman, who would be not altogether
pleased to hear that she is bringing up her children
according to the theories of an inhabitant of Italy,
has by the instinctive action of her own wits hit
upon several inventions which might, without sur-
prising the Directress, be transferred bodily to any
Casa dei Bambini. All of her children have gone
through what she calls the " folding-up fever," and
she has laid away in the garret, waiting for the
newest baby to grow up to it, the apparatus which

ADAPTATIONS OR ADDITIONS 109

has so enchanted and instructed all the older ones.
This " apparatus," to use the unfortunately mouth-
filling and inflated name which has become attached
to Dr. Montessori's simple expedients, is a set of
cloths of all shapes and sizes ranging from a small
washcloth to an old bedspread.

When the first of my neighbour's children was a
little over three, his mother found him, one hot Tues-
day, busily employed in " folding up," that is, crump-
ling and crushing the fresh shirtwaists which she had
just laboriously ironed smooth. She snatched them
away from him, as any one of us would have done,
but she was nimble-witted enough to view the situa-
tion from an impersonal point of view which few of
us would have adopted. She really " observed " the
child, to use the Montessori phrase ; she put out of
mind with a conscious effort her natural extreme
irritation at having the work of hours destroyed in
minutes, and she turned her quick mind to an ana-
lysis of the child's action as acute and sound as any
the Roman psychologist has ever made. Not that
she was in the least conscious of going through this
elaborate mental process. Her own simple narration
of what followed runs : " I snatched 'em away from
him, and I was as mad as a hornit for a minit or two.
And then I got to thinkin' about it. I says to myself,
' He's so little that 'taint nothin' to him whether shirt-
waists are smooth or wrinkled,so he couldn't have taken
no satisfaction in bein' misch/Vvous. Seems 's though
he was wantin' to fold up things without really sen-

110 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

sin' what he was doin1 it with. He's seen me fold
things up. There's other things than shirtwaists he
could fold, that 'twouldn't do no harm for him to fuss
with.' And I set the iron down and took a dish-towel
out'n the basket, and says to him, where he sat cryin',
" Here Buddy, here's somethin* you can fold up.' And
he set there for an hour by the clock, foldin' and un-
foldin' that thing."

That historic dish-towel is still among the " ap-
paratus " in her garret. Five children have learned
deftness and exactitude of muscular action by means
of it, and the sixth is getting to the age when his
mother's experienced eye detects in him signs of the
" fever."

Now, of course, the real difference between that
woman and Dr. Montessori, and the real reason why
Dr. Montessori's work comes in the nature of a revela-
tion of new forces, although hundreds of " natural
mothers " long have been using devices strongly re-
sembling hers, is that my neighbour hasn't the slightest
idea of what she is doing and she has a very erroneous
idea of why she is doing it, inasmuch as she regards
the fervour of her children for that fascinating sense
exercise as merely a Providential means to enable
her to do her housework untroubled by them. She
could not possibly convince any other mother of any
good reason for following her examples because she is
quite ignorant of the good reason.

Dr. Montessori, on the other hand, with the keen
self-consciousness of its own processes which char-

ADAPTATIONS OR ADDITIONS 111

acterizes the trained mind, is perfectly aware, not
only of what she is doing, but of a broadly funda-
mental and wholly convincing philosophical reason
for doing it — namely, that the child's body is a
machine which he will have to use all his life in
whatever he does, and the sooner he learns the
accurate and masterful handling of every cog of this
machine the better for him.

Now, whenever frontier conditions exist, people
generally are forced to learn to employ their senses
and muscles much more competently than is possible
under the usual modern conditions of specialized labour
performed almost entirely away from the home ; and
though for most of us the old-fashioned conditions of
farm-life so ideal for children, the free roaming of
field and wood, the care and responsibility for animals,
the knowledge of plant-life, the intimate acquaintance
with the beauties of the seasons, the enforced self-
dependence in crises, are impossibly out of reach,
we can give our children some of the benefits to be
had from them by analysing them and seeing
exactly which are the elements in them so tonic and
invigorating to child-life, and by adapting them to
our own changed conditions. There are even a few
items which we might take over bodily. A number of
families in my acquaintance have inherited from their
ancestors odd " games " for children, which follow
perfectly the Montessori ideas. One of them is called
the " hearth-side seed-game " and is played as the
family sits about the hearth in the evening — though

112 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

it might just as well be played about a table in the
dining-room with the light turned low. Each child
is given a cup of mixed grains, corn, wheat, oats, and
buckwheat. The game is a competition to see who can
the soonest, by the sense of touch only, separate them
into separate piles, and it has an endless fascination
for every child who tries it — if he is of the right
age, for it is far too fatiguing for the very little
ones. Another family makes a competitive game of
the daily task of peeling the potatoes and apples
needed for the family meals. Once the general prin-
ciple of the " Montessori method " is grasped, there
is no reason why we should not apply it to every
activity of our children. Indeed Dr. Montessori is as
impatient as any other philosopher of a slavishly
close and unelastic interpretation of her ideas. Fur-
thermore, it is to be remembered that the set of
Montessori apparatus was not intended by its inventor
to represent all the possible practical applications of
her theories. For instance, there are in it none of
the devices for physical exercises which she recom-
mends so highly, but of which as yet she has been
able to introduce little into her schools. Here, too,
she would wish us to make an effort to comprehend
intelligently her general ideas and to use our own
invention to adapt them to our own conditions.

A good example of this is the enlightenment which
comes to most of us, after reading her statement about
the relative weakness of little children's legs. She
calls our attention to the fact that the legs of the new-

ADAPTATIONS OR ADDITIONS 113

born baby are the most negligible members he pos-
sesses, small and weak out of all proportion to his
body and arms. Then, with an imposing scientific
array of carefully gathered statistics, she proves that
this disproportion of strength and of size continues
during early childhood, up to six or seven. In other
words, that a little child's legs are weaker and tire
more quickly than the rest of him, and hence he craves
not only those exercises which he takes in running
about in his active play, but others in which he
can relieve his legs of his weight.

This fact, although doubtless it has been common
property among doctors for many years, was entirely
new to me ; and probably will be to many of the
mothers who read this book, but an ingenious person
has only to hear it to think at once of a number
of exercises based on it. Dr. Montessori herself
suggests a little fence on which the children can walk
along sideways, supporting part of their weight with
their arms. She also describes a swing with a seat
so long that the child's legs stretched out in front of
him are entirely supported by it, and which is hung
before a wall or board against which the child presses
his feet as he swings up to it, thus keeping himself
in motion. These devices are both so simple that
almost any child might have the benefit of them, but
even without them it is possible to profit by the above
bit of physiological information, if it is only by
restraining ourselves from forbidding a child the
instinctive gesture we must all have seen when he
8

114 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

throws himself on his stomach across a chair and
kicks his hanging legs. If all the chairs in the house
are too good to allow this exercise, or if it shocks
too much the adult ideas of propriety, a bench or
kitchen-chair out under the trees will serve the same
purpose.

Everyone who is familiar with the habits of natural
children, or who remembers his own childish passions,
knows how irresistibly they are fascinated by a
ladder, and always greatly prefer it to a staircase.
The reason is apparent. After early infancy they
are not allowed to go upstairs on their hands and
knees, but are taught, and rightly taught, to lift the
whole weight of their bodies with their legs, the in-
herent weakness of which we have just learned. Of
course this very exercise in moderation is just what
weak legs need ; but why not furnish also a length
of ladder out of doors, short enough so that a fall on
the pile of hay or straw at the foot will not be
serious ? As a matter of fact, you will be astonished
to see that, even with a child as young as three, the
hay or straw is only needed to calm your own mind.
The child has no more need of it than you, nor so
much, his little hands and feet clinging prehensilely
to the rounds of the ladder as he delightedly ascends
and descends.

The single board about six inches wide and three
or four inches from the ground (a length of joist or
studding serves very well), along which the child
walks and runs, is an exercise for equilibrium which

ADAPTATIONS OR ADDITIONS 115

is elsewhere described (page 150). This can be
varied, as he grows in strength and poise, by letting
him try some of the simpler rope-walking tricks of
balance, walking on the board with one foot, or back-
ward, or with his eyes shut. It is fairly safe to say,
however, that, having provided the board, you need
exercise your own ingenuity no further in the matter.
The variety and number of exercises of the sort
which a group of active children can devise go far
beyond anything the adult brain could conceive.
The exercises with water are described on page 151.
These also can be varied to infinity, by the use of
receptacles of different shapes, bottles with wide or
narrow mouths, etc.

The folding-up exercises seem to me excellent, and
the hearth-side seed-game is, in a modified form,
already in use in the Casa dei Bambini. Small, low
see-saws, the right size for very young children, are
of great help in aiding the little one to learn the
trick of balancing himself under all conditions, and
let us remember that the sooner he learns this all-
important secret of equilibrium, the better for him.
He will not then have the heavy handicap of un-
certain, awkward, misdirected movements. He will
never know the disheartening mental distress of lack
of confidence in his own ability deftly, strongly, and
automatically to manage his own body under all
ordinary circumstances.

A very tiny spring-board, ending over a heap of
hay, is another expedient for teaching three- and

116 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

four-year-olds that they need not necessarily fall in
a heap if their balance is quickly altered. If this
simple device is too hard to manage, a substitute,
which any woman and even an older child can
arrange for a little one, is a long thin board, with
plenty of " give " to it, supported at each end by big
stones, or by two or three bits of wood. The little
child bouncing up and down on this and "jumping
himself off" into soft sand, or into a pile of hay,
learns unconsciously so many of the secrets of bodily
poise that walking straight soon becomes a foregone
conclusion.

One of the blindfold games in use in Montessori
schools is played with wooden solids of different
shapes, cubes, cylinders, pyramids, etc. The blind-
folded child picks these, one at a time, out of the
pile before him and identifies each by his sense of
touch. In our family this has become an after-dinner
game, played in the leisure moments before we all
push away from the table, with a napkin for blind-
fold, and with the table-furnishings for apparatus.

The identification of different stuffs, velvet, cotton,
satin, woollen, etc., can be managed in any house
which possesses a rag-bag. I do not see why the
possession of a doll, preferably a rag-doll, should not
be as valuable as the Montessori frames. Most dolls
are so small that the hooks and eyes and the buttons
and buttonholes on their minute garments are too
difficult for little fingers to manage, whereas a doll
which could wear the child's own clothes would

COLOUR BOXES COMPRISING Sl'Oni.s OE LIGHT c:OLOURS
AM) MGIIT SHADES OF EACH COLOUR

ADAPTATIONS OR ADDITIONS 117

certainly teach him more about the geography of his
raiment than any amount of precept. I can lay no
claim to originality in this idea. It was suggested
to my mind by the constant appearance in new
costumes of the big Teddy-bear of a three-year-old
child, whose impassioned struggles with the buttons
of her bear's clothes form the most admirable of
self-imposed manual gymnastics.

Lastly, it must not be forgotten that the " sets of
Montessori apparatus" must be supplemented by
several articles of child-furniture. There are not in it
the little light table, the small low chair so necessary
for children's comfort and for their acquiring correct,
agreeable habits of bodily posture. Such little chairs
are easily to be secured, but, alas ! rarely found in
even the most prosperous households. We must not
forget the need for a low washstand with light and
easily handled equipment, the hooks set low enough
for little arms to reach up to them, so that, later, we
shall not have to struggle with the habit fixed in the
eight-year-old boy, of careless irresponsibility about
those of his clothes which are not on his back ; the
small brooms and dust-pans so that tiny girls will
take it as a matter of course that they are as much
interested as their mothers in the cleanliness of a
room ; all the devices, in short, possible to contrive
to make a little child really at home in his father's
house.

CHAPTER VVIII

SOME REMARKS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE
SYSTEM

WHEN I first began to understand to some extent
the thoroughgoing radicalism of the philosophy of
liberty which underlies all the intricate detail of
Dr. Montessori's system, I used to wonder why it
went home to me with such a sudden inward con-
viction of its truth, and why it moved me so strangely,
almost like the conversion to a new religion. This
Italian woman is not the first, by any means, to speak
eloquently of the righteousness of personal liberty.
As far back as Montaigne's '• Fay ce que vouldras "
someone was feeling and expressing that. Even the
righteousness of such liberty for the child is no in-
vention of hers. Jean Jacques Rousseau's " Emile,"
in spite of all its disingenuous evading of the principle
in practice, was founded on it in theory ; and Froebel
had as clear a vision as any seer, as Montessori
herself, of just the liberty his followers admit in
theory and find it so hard to allow in practice.

Why, then, should those who come to Rome to
study the Montessori work, stammerers though they

118

PHILOSOPHY OF THE SYSTEM 119

may be, wish, all of them, to go away and prophesy ?
For almost without exception this was the common
result among the widely diverse national types I saw
in Rome ; always granting, of course, that they had
seen one of the good schools and not those which
present a farcical caricature of the method.

In thinking the matter over since, I have come to
the conclusion that the vividness of inward conviction
arises from the fact that the founder of this " new "
philosophy bases it on the theory of democracy ; and
there is no denying that the world to-day is demo-
cratic, that we honestly in our heart of hearts believe,
as we believe in the law of gravity, that, on the whole,
democracy, for all its shortcomings, has in it the germ
of the ideal society of the future.

Now, our own democracy was based, a hundred or
so years ago, on the idea that men reach their highest
development only when they have, for the growth of
their individuality, the utmost possible freedom which
can be granted them without interfering with the
rights and freedom of others. Little by little during
the last half-century the idea has grown that, inas-
much as women form half the race, the betterment
of the whole social group might be hastened if this
beneficial principle were applied to them.

If you will imagine yourself living sixty or so
years ago, when, to conservative minds, this idea of
personal liberty for women was like the sight of
dynamite under the foundations of society, and to
radical minds shone like the dawn of a brighter day,

120 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

you can imagine how startling and thrilling is the
first glimpse of its application to children. I felt,
during the beginning of my consideration of the
question, all the sharp pangs of intellectual growing-
pains which must have racked my grandfather when
it first occurred to him that my grandmother was a
human being like himself, who would very likely
thrive under the same conditions which were good for
him. For, just as my grandfather, in spite of the
sincerest affection for his wife, had never conceived
that he might be doing her an injury by insisting on
doing her thinking for her, so I, for all my love for
my children, had never once thought that by my
competent, loving " management " of them, I might
be starving and stunting some of their most valuable
moral and intellectual qualities.

In theory I instantly granted this principle of as
much personal liberty as possible for children. I
could not help granting it, pushed irresistibly forward
as I was by the generations of my voting, self-
governing ancestors ; but the resultant splintering
upheaval of all my preconceived ideas about children
was portentous.

The first thing that Dr. Montessori's penetrating
and daring eye had seen in her survey of the problem
of education, and the fact to which she devotes
throughout her most forceful, direct, and pungent
explanation, had simply never occurred to me, in
spite of Froebel's mild divination of it, namely, that
children are nothing more or less than human beings.

PHILOSOPHY OF THE SYSTEM 121

I was as astonished by this fact as I was amazed that
I had not thought of it myself; and I instantly per-
ceived a long train of consequences leading off from
it to a wholly ;unexplored country. True, children
are not exactly like adults ; but then, neither are
women exactly like men, nor are slow, phlegmatic men
exactly like the red-headed, quick-tempered type ; but
they all belong to the genus of human beings, and
those principles which slow centuries of progress have
proved true about the genus as a whole hold true
about subdivisions of it. Children are much weaker
physically than most adults, their judgment is not so
seasoned by experience, and their attention is more
fitful. Hence, on the whole, they need more guidance
than grown-ups. But, on the other hand, the motives,
the instincts, the needs, the potential capacities of
children are all human and nothing but human.
Their resemblances to adults are a thousand times
more numerous and vital than their differences.
What is good for the one must, in a not excessively
modified form, be good for the other.

With this obvious fact firmly in mind, Dr. Mon-
tessori simply looked back over history and drew upon
the stores of the world's painfully acquired wisdom as
to the best way to extract the greatest possibilities
from the world's inhabitants. If it is true, she rea-
soned, that men and women have reached their highest
development only when they have had the utmost pos-
sible liberty for the growth of their individualities,
if it is true that slavery has been the most ruinously

122 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

unsatisfactory of all social expedients, both for mas-
ters and slaves, if society has found it necessary for
its own good to abolish not only slavery but caste
laws and even guild rules ; if, with all its faults, we
are agreed that democracy works better than the
wisest of paternal despotisms, then it ought to be
true that in the schoolroom's miniature copy of
society there should be less paternal despotism, more
democracy, less uniformity of regulations, and more —
very much more — individuality.

Therefore, although we cannot allow children as
much practical freedom as that suitable for men of
ripe experience, it is apparent that it is our first duty
as parents to make every effort to give them as full
a measure of liberty as possible, exercising our utmost
ingenuity to make the family life an enlightened
democracy. But this is not an easy matter. A
democracy, being a much more complicated machine
than an autocracy, is always harder to organize and
conduct. Moreover, the family is so old a human in-
stitution that, like everything else very old, it has
acquired barnacle-like accretions of irrelevant tradi-
tion. Elements of Russian tyranny have existed in
the institution of the family so long that our very
familiarity with them prevents us from recognizing
them without an effort, and prevents our conceiving
family life without them ; quite as though, in this age
of dentistry, we should find it difficult to conceive of
old age without the good old characteristic of tooth-
lessness. To renovate this valuable institution of the

PHILOSOPHY OF THE SYSTEM 123

family (and one of the unconscious aims of the Mon-
tessori system is nothing more or less than the renova-
tion of family life), we must engage upon a daily
battle with our own moral and intellectual inertia,
rising each morning with a fresh resolve to scrutinize
with new eyes our relations to our children. We must
realize that the idea of the innate " divine right of
parents " is as exploded an idea as the " divine right
of kings." Fathers and mothers and kings nowadays
hold their positions rightfully only on the same con-
ditions as those governing other modern office-holders
— that they are better fitted for the job than anyone
else.

I speak from poignant personal experience of the
difficulty of holding this conception in mind. When
I said above that I " saw at once a long train of
consequences following this new principle of personal
liberty for children," I much overstated my own
acumen ; for I am continually perceiving that I saw
these consequences but very vaguely through the
dimmed glasses of my unconscious hidebound con-
servatism, and I am constantly being startled by the
possibility of some new, although very simple
application of it in my daily contact with the child-
world. A wholesome mental exercise in this connec-
tion is to run over in one's mind the dramatic changes
in human ideas about life which have taken place
gradually from the Roman rule that the father was
the governor, executioner, law-giver, and absolute
autocrat, down to our own days. For all our cling-

124 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

ing to the idea of a closely intimate family life, most
of us would turn with horror from any attempt to re-
turn to such tyranny as that even of our own Puritan
forebears. It is possible that our descendants may
look back on our present organization with as much
astonished and uncomprehending revulsion.

The principle, then, of the Montessori school is
the ideal principle of democracy, namely, that human
beings reach their highest development (and hence
are of most use to society) only when for the growth
of their individuality they have the utmost possible
liberty that can be granted them without inte/fering
with the rights of others. Now, when Dr. Montessori,
five years ago, founded the first Casa dei Bambini, she
not only believed in that principle, but she saw that
children are as human as any of us ; and acting with
that precipitate Latin faith in logic as a guide to
practical conduct which is so startling to Anglo-
Saxons, she put these two convictions into actual
practice. The result has electrified the world.

She took as her motto the old, old, ever-misunder-
stood one of " Liberty ! " — that liberty which we still
distrust so profoundly in spite of the innumerable
hard knocks with which the centuries have taught us it
is the only law of life. She was convinced that the
" necessity for school discipline " is only another ex-
pression of humanity's enduring suspicion of that
freedom which is so essential to its welfare, and that
schoolroom rules for silence, for immobility, for uni-
formity of studies and of results, are of the same

PHILOSOPHY OF THE SYSTEM 125

nature and as outworn as caste rules in the world
of adults, or laws against the free choice of residence
for a workman, against the free choice of a profession
for women, against the free advance of any individual
to any position of responsibility which he is capable
of filling.

All over again in this new field of education Dr.
Montessori fought the old fight against the old idea
that liberty means red caps and riots and guillotines.
All afresh, as though the world had never learned the
lesson, she was obliged to show that liberty means
the only lasting road to order and discipline and self-
control. Once again, for the thousandth time, people
needed to be reminded that the reign of the tyrant
who imposes laws on human souls from the outside
(even though that tyrant intends nothing but the best
for his subjects and be called " teacher " ) produces
smothered rebellion, or apathy, or broken submissive-
ness, but never energetic, forward progress.

For this constant turning to that trust in the
safety of freedom, which is perhaps the only lasting
spiritual conquest of our time, is the keynote of her
system. This is the real answer to the question,
" What is there in the Montessori method which is
so different from all other educational methods ? "
This is the vital principle often overlooked in the
fertility of invention and scientific ingenuity with
which she has applied it.

This reverence for the child's personality, this
supreme faith that liberty of action is not only safe

126 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

to give children, but is the prerequisite of their
growth, is the rock on which the edifice of her
system is being raised. It is also the rock on which
the barks of many investigators are wrecked. When
they realize that she really puts her theory into
execution, they cry out aghast, " What ! a school
without a rule for silence, for immobility, a school
without fixed seats, where children may sit on the
floor if they like, or walk about as they please, with-
out stationary desks ; a school where children may
play all day if they choose, may select their own
occupations, where the teacher is always silent and in
the background — why, that is no school at all — it is
anarchy ! "

One seems to hear faint echoes from another
generation crying out, "What! a society without
hereditary aristocracy, without a caste system, where
a rail-splitter may become supreme governor, where
people may decide for themselves what to believe
without respect for authority, and may choose how
they wish to earn their living . . . this is no society
at all ! It is anarchy ! "

Dr. Montessori has two answers to make to such
doubters. One is that the rule in her schools, like
the rule in civilized society, is that no act is allowed
which transgresses against the common welfare, or is
in itself uncomely or offensive. That the children are
free does not mean that they may throw books at
each other's heads, or light a bonfire on the floor, any
more than free citizens of a republic may obstruct

PHILOSOPHY OF THE SYSTEM 127

traffic, or run a drain into the water-supply of a
town. It means simply that they are subject to no
unnecessary restraint, and above all to no meddling
with their instinctive private preferences. The second
answer, even more convincing to hard-headed people
than the first, is the work done in the Casa dei Bam-
bini, where every detail of the Montessori theory has
been more than proved, with an abundance of con-
firmatory detail which astonishes even Dr. Montessori
herself. The bugbear of discipline simply does not
exist for these schools. By taking advantage of their
natural instincts and tendencies, the children are
made to perform feats of self-abnegation, self-control,
and collective discipline, impossible to obtain under
the most rigid application of the old rules, and, as for
the amount of information acquired unconsciously
and painlessly by those babies, it is one of the fairy-
stories of modern times.

CHAPTER IX

APPLICATION OF THIS PHILOSOPHY TO HOME LIFE

NATURALLY, the question which concerns us is,
how the spiritual discoveries made in this new
institution in a far-away city of Italy can be used
to benefit our own children, in our own every-
day family life. It must be stated uncompro-
misingly, to begin with, that they can be applied
to our daily lives only if we experience a " change
of heart." The use of the vernacular of religion
in this connection is not inappropriate, for what
we are facing, in these new principles, is a new
phase of the religion of humanity. We are simply,
at last, to include children in humanity, and since
despotism, even the most enlightened varieties of
it, has been proved harmful to humanity, we are to
abstain from being their despots, even their paternal,
wise, and devoted despots. This does not mean that
they are not to live under some form of government
of which we are the head. We have as much right
to safeguard their interests against their own weak-
nesses as society has to safeguard ours, in forbid-
ding grade railways in big cities for instance, but we

128

APPLICATION OF THIS PHILOSOPHY 129

have no more right than society has, to interfere with
inoffensive individual tastes, preferences, needs, and,
above all, initiative.

At this point I can hear in my mind's ear a
chorus of indignant parents' voices, crying out that
nothing is further from their theory or practice than
despotism over the children, and that, so far from
ruling their little ones, they are the absolute slaves of
their offspring (forgetting that in many cases there
is no more despotic master than a slave of old
standing). To answer this natural protest I wish
here to be allowed a digression for the purpose of
attempting a brief analysis of a trait of human
egotism, the understanding of which bears closely on
this phase of the relations of parent and child. I
refer to the instinctive pleasure taken by us all in the
dependence of someone upon us.

This is so closely connected with benevolence that
it is usually wholly unrecognized as a separate and
quite different characteristic. Even when it is seen,
it is identified only by those who suffer from it, and
any intimation of its existence on their part savours
so nearly of ingratitude that they have not, as a
rule, ventured to complain of what is frequently an
almost intolerable tyranny. Just as it is the spiteful
member of a family who is the only one to blurt
out home-truths which run counter to the traditional
family illusions, so it is only a thoroughly bad-
tempered analyst, one who takes a malicious pleasure
in dwelling on human meannesses, who can perform

9

130 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

the useful function of diagnosing this little suspected,
very prevalent, human vice.

Here is the sardonic Hazlitt, derisively relieving his
mind on the subject of benefactors : "... Benefits
are often conferred out of ostentation or pride. As
the principle of action is a love of power, the com-
placency in the object of friendly regard ceases with
the opportunity or the necessity for the manifest
display of power ; and when the unfortunate protege"
is just coming to land and expects a last helping
hand, he is, to his surprise, pushed back in order
that he may be saved from drowning once more.
You are not haled ashore as you had supposed by
those kind friends, as a mutual triumph, after all
your struggles and their exertions on your behalf.
It is a piece of presumption in you to be seen walk-
ing on terra firma ; you are required at the risk of
their friendship to be always swimming in troubled
waters that they may have the credit of throwing
out ropes and sending out life-boats to you without
ever bringing you ashore. The instant you can go
alone, or can stand on your own ground, you are
discarded."

Now the majority of us in these piping times of
mediocrity have no grounds, fancied or real, for
assuming the rdle of tyrannical Providence to other
people. But the instinct, in spite of the decreased
opportunity for its exercise, is none the less alive
in our hearts ; and when chance throws in our way
a little child, our primitive, instinctive affection for

APPLICATION OF THIS PHILOSOPHY 131

whom confuses in our minds the motives underlying
our pseudo-benevolent actions, do we not wreak upon
it unconsciously all that latent desire to be depended
upon, to be the stronger, to be looked up to, to gloat
over the weakness of another ?

If this seems an exaggerated statement, consider
for a moment the real significance of the feeling
expressed by the mothers we have all met, when they
cry, <l Oh, I can't bear to have the babies grow up ! "
and when they refuse to correct the pretty, lisping,
inarticulate baby talk. I have been one of those
mothers myself, and I certainly would have regarded
as malicious and spiteful any person who had told
me that my feelings sprang from almost unadul-
terated egotism, and that I " couldn't bear to have
the babies grow up" because I wanted to continue
longer in my complacent, self-assumed role of God,
that I wished to be surrounded by little sycophants
who, knowing no standard but my personality, could
not judge me as anything but infallible, and that
I was wilfully keeping the children granted me by
a kind Heaven as weak and dependent on me as
possible that they might continue to secrete more
food for my egotism.

What I now see to be a plain statement of the
ugly truth underlying my sentimental reluctance to
have the babies grow up would have seemed to
me the most heartless attack on mother-love. It
now occurs to me that mother-love should be some-
thing infinitely more searching and subtle. Modern

182 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

society, with its enforced drains and vaccinations and
milk-inspection and pure-food laws, does much of
the physical protecting which used to fall to the
lot of mothers. Our part should not be, like be-
wildered bees, to live idly on the accumulation of
virtues achieved for us by the hard-won battles of
our ancestors against their lower physical instincts ;
but to catch up the standard and advance into the
harder battle against the hidden, treacherous am-
bushes of egotism, to conceive a new, high devotion
for our children, a devotion which has in it courage
for them as well as care for them ; which is made
up of faith in their better, stronger natures, as well
as love for them, and which begins by the ruthless
slaughter, so far as we can reach it, of the selfishness
which makes us take pleasure in their dependence on
yus, rather than in seeing them grow (even though
it may mean away from us) in the ability wisely
to regulate their own lives. We must take care
that we mothers do not treat our children as we
reproach men for having treated women, with
patronizing, enfeebling protection. We must learn
to wish, above all things, to see the babies grow
up, since there is no condition (for any creature
not a baby) more revolting than babyishness, just
as there is no state more humiliating (for any but
a child) than childishness. Let us learn to be
ashamed of our too imperious care, which deprives
them of every chance for action, for self-reliance,
for fighting down their own weaknesses, which

APPLICATION OF THIS PHILOSOPHY 133

snatches away from them every opportunity to
strengthen them by overcoming obstacles. We must
learn to see in a little child not only a much-loved
little body, informed by a will more or less pliable
to our own, but a valiant spirit, longing for the
exercise of its own powers, powers which are different
from ours, from those of every human being who has
ever existed.

There is no danger that, in combating this subtle
vice, we shall fall back into the grosser one of physical
tyranny over women, children, or the poor. That
step forward has been taken conclusively. That
question has been settled for all time and has been
crystallized in popular opinion. We may still tyran-
nize coarsely over the weak, but we are quite con-
scious that we are doing something to be ashamed
of. We can therefore, without fear of reactionary
set-backs, devote ourselves to creating a popular
consciousness of the sin of moral and intellectual
tyranny.

Now all this reasoning has been conducted by
means of abstract ideas and big words. It may
seem hardly applicable to the relations of an affec-
tionate parent with his three-year-old child. How,
practically, concretely, at once, to-day, can we begin
to avoid paternal despotism over little children ?

To begin with, by giving them the practical train-
ing necessary to physical independence of life. Any-
one who knows a woman who lived in the South
during the old regime must have heard stories of the

134 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

pathetic, grotesque helplessness to which the rich
white population was reduced by the presence and
personal service of the slaves — the grown women
who could not button their own shoes, the grown
men who had never in their lives assembled all the
articles necessary for a complete toilet. Dr. Montes-
sori says, " The paralytic who cannot take off his
boots because of a pathological fact, and the prince
who dare not take them off because of a social fact
are in reality reduced to the same condition." How
many mothers whose willing fingers linger lovingly
over the buttons and strings and hooks and eyes of
the little costume are putting themselves in the
pernicious attitude of the slave ? How many other
bustling, competent, quick-stepping mothers, dress-
ing and undressing, washing and feeding and re-
gulating their children, as though they were little
automata, because " it's so much easier to do it for
them than to bother to teach them how to do it,"
are reducing the little ones to a state of practical
paralysis? As if ease were the aim of a mother
in her relations to her child ! It would be easier,
as far as that is concerned, to eat the child's meal
for it ; and a study of the " competent " brand of
mother almost leads one to suspect that only the
physical impossibility of this substituted activity
keeps it from being put into practice. The too
loving mother, the one who is too competent, the
one who is too wedded to the regularity of her house-
hold routine, the impatient mother, the one who is

APPLICATION OF THIS PHILOSOPHY 135

" no teacher and never can tell anybody how to do
things," all these diverse personalities, though actu-
ated by quite differing motives, are doing the same
thing, unconsciously, benevolently, overbearingly in-
sisting upon living the child's life for him.

But it is evident that simply keeping our hands
off is not enough. To begin with the process of
dressing himself, the first in order of the day's
routine, a child of three, with no training, turned
loose with the usual outfit of clothes, could never
dress himself in the longest day of the year. And
here, with a serious problem to be solved, we are
back beside the buttoning boy of the Children's
Home. The child must learn how to be independent,
as he must learn how to be anything else that is
worth being, and the only excuse for existence of a
parent is the possibility of his furnishing the means
for the child to acquire this information with all
speed. Let us take a long look at the buttoning
boy over there in Rome and return to our own
three-year-old for a more systematic survey of his
problem, which is none other than the beginning
of his emancipation from the prison of babyishness.
Let him learn the different ways of fastening gar-
ments together on the Montessori frames, if you
have them, or in any other way your ingenuity can
devise. Old garments of your own, put on a cheap
dress-form, are not a bad substitute for that part of
the Montessori apparatus, or the large doll suggested,
on page 116,

13C A MONTESSORI MOTHER

Then apply your mind, difficult as that process
is for all of us, to the simplification of the child's
costumes, even if you are led into such an unheard-
of innovation as fastening the little waists and dresses
up the front. Let me wonder, parenthetically, why
children's clothes should all be fastened at the back ?
Men manage to protect themselves from the weather
on the opposite principle.

Then, finally, give him time to learn and to
practise the new process ; and time is one of the
necessary elements of life most often denied to little
children, who always take vastly longer than we do
to complete a given process. I am myself a devoted
adherent of the clock, and cannot endure the formless
irregularity of a daily life without fixed hours, so
that I do not speak without a keen realization of the
fact that time cannot be granted to little children to
live their own lives, without our undergoing con-
siderable inconvenience, no matter how ingeniously
we arrange the matter. We must feel a whole-
hearted willingness to forgo a superfluity in life for
the sake of safeguarding an essential of life. When
I feel the temptation, into which my impatient
temperament is constantly leading me, to perform
some action for a child which it would be better for
him to do for himself, because his slowness interferes
with my household schedule, I bring rigorously to
mind the Montessori teacher who did not tuck in
the child's napkin. And I severely scrutinize the
household process, the regularity of which is being

APPLICATION OF THIS PHILOSOPHY 137

upset, to see if that regularity is really worth a
check to the child's growth in self-dependence.

Once in a while it really does seem to me, on
mature consideration, that regularity is worth that
sacrifice, but so seldom as to be astonishing. One
of the few instances is the regularity of the three
meals a day. This seems to be an excellent means
of inculcating real social feeling in the child, of
making him understand the necessity for occa-
sional sacrifices of individual desires to benefit the
common weal. One should take care not to neg-
lect or pass over the few genuine opportunities in
the life of a little child, when he may feel that, in
common with the rest of the family, he is making
a sacrifice which counts for the sake of the common
good.

But most other situations yield very different
results when analysed. For instance, if a child must
dress in a cold room, it is better for an adult to
stuff the little arms and legs into the clothes with
all haste, rather than run the risk of chilling the
child. But as a rule, if the conditions are really
honestly examined, these two alternatives are seen
not to be the only ones. He is set perhaps to dress
in a cold room because we have a tradition that it
is "messy" and "common" to have dressing and
undressing going on anywhere except in a bedroom.
The question I must then ask myself is no longer,
"Is there not danger that the child will take cold
if I give him time to dress himself? " but, " Is the

138 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

ordered respectability of my warm parlour worth a
check to my child's normal growth ? "

And it is to some such quite unexpected question
that one is constantly led by the attempt really to
analyse the various restrictions we put upon the
child's freedom to live his own life. These restric-
tions multiply in such a perverse ratio with the
material prosperity and conventionality of our lives
that it is a truism that the children of the very poor
fare better than ours in the opportunities offered
them for the development of self-reliance, self-control,
and independence, almost the most valuable outfit
for the battle of life a human being can have.

It is impossible, of course, to consider here all
the processes of the child's day in as minute detail
as this question of his morning toilet. But the same
procedure should be followed, because help tJiat is
not positively necessary is a hindrance to a growing
organism. It is well to put strings for your vines
to climb up, but it does them no good to have you
try to "help" them by pulling on the tips of the
tendrils. The little child should be allowed time to
wash his own face and hands, to brush his teeth, and
to feed himself, although it would be quicker to
continue our Strasbourg goose tradition of stuffing
him ourselves. He should, as soon as possible, learn
to put on and take off his own wraps, hat, and
rubbers. He should carry his own playthings, should
learn to open and shut doors, go up and downstairs
freely, hang up his own clothes (hooks placed low

MATERIALS FOR TEACHING ROUGH AXD SMOOTH

must not be forgotten), and look himself for articles
he has misplaced.

Adults who, for the first time, try this regime
with little children are astonished to find that it is
not the patience of the little child, but their own,
which is inadequate. A child (if he is young enough
not to have acquired the invalid's habit of being
waited upon) will persevere unendingly through a
series of grotesquely awkward attempts, for instance,
to climb upon an adult's chair. The sight of this
laborious attempt to accomplish a perfectly easy
feat reduces his quick-stepping, competent mother
to nervous fidgets, requiring all her self-control to
resist. She is almost irresistibly driven to rushing
forward and lifting him up. If she does, she is very
apt to see him slide to the floor and begin all over
again. It is not elevation to the chair which he
desires ; it is the capacity to attain it himself,
unaided, which is his goal, a goal like all others in
his life which his mother cannot reach for him.

And if all this sounds too troublesome and com-
plicated, let it be remembered that the Children's
Home looms close at hand, ominously ready to
devote itself to making conditions exactly right for
the child's growth, never impatient, with no other
aim in life and no other occupation but to do what
is best for the child. If we are to be allowed to keep
our children with us, we must prove worthy the
sacred trust.

For, practically, the highly successful existence of

140 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

the Casa dei Bambini, keeping the children as it
does all day, takes for granted that the average
parent cannot or will not make the average home
into a place really suited for the development of
small children. It is visibly apparent that, as far as
physical surroundings are concerned, he is Gulliver
struggling with the conditions of Brobdingnag. He
eats his meals from a table as high for him as
the mantelpiece would be for us, he climbs up and
downstairs with the painful effort we expend on
the ascent of the Pyramids, he gets into an arm-
chair as we would climb into a tree, and he can
no more alter the position of it than we could that
of the tree.

As for the conduct of life, he is considered
" naughty " if he interferes with adult occupations,
which, going on all about him all the time and
being entirely incomprehensible to him, are very
difficult to avoid ; and he is " good " like the " good
Indian," according to the degree of his silent
passivity. When we return after a brief absence
and inquire of a little child, " Have you been a
good child?" do we not mean simply, "Have you
been as little inconvenient as possible to your
elders?" To most of us who are honest with
ourselves it comes as rather a surprise that this
standard of virtue should not be the natural and
inevitable one.

I leave to another chapter the question, a most
searching and painful one for me, as to whether

APPLICATION OF THIS PHILOSOPHY 141

the Casa dei Bambini will not ultimately be the
Home for all our children, and here confine myself
to the statement which no unprejudiced mind can
deny, that such an institution, arranged as it has
been with the most single-hearted desire to further
the children's interests, is now better adapted for
child-life than our average homes, into which children
may be welcomed lovingly, but which are adapted
in every detail of their material, intellectual, and
spiritual life for adults only. It is my firm conviction
that, in my own case, a working compromise may
be effected, thanks to my alarmed jealousy of the
greater perfection of the Montessori Children's Home;
but I realize that it required the alarming sight and
study of that institution to make me see that I was
forcing my children to live under a great many
unnecessary restrictions. And, if there is one thing
above all others to be kept in mind by a convert to
these new ideas it is that an unnecessary restriction
in a child's life is a crime. The most puritanical
soul among us must see that there are quite enough
necessary restrictions for the child, as for all of us,
to serve, if they are all recognized and rigorously
obeyed, as disciplinary forces to the most turbulent
nature.

CHAPTER X

SOME CONSIDERATIONS ON THE NATURE OF
"DISCIPLINE"

WITH the last affirmation of the preceding
chapter I have brought myself to another bedrock
principle of this new religion of childhood, one
which at first I was unable to understand and
hence to accept. In my very blood there runs that
conviction of the necessity for discipline which
coloured so profoundly all early New England life.
At the sight of this too-pleasant and too-smiling
world of children, some old Puritan of an ancestor
sprang to life in me and cried out sourly, " But
it's good for children to do what they don't like
to do, and to keep on with something after they
want to stop. They must in later life. They should
begin now."

The answer to this objection is one I have had
practically to work out for myself, since the Italian
exponents of the system, having at back of them an
unbroken line of life-giving and life-trusting Latin
forefathers, found it practically impossible to under-
stand what was in my mind. There was much talk

142

THE NATURE OF "DISCIPLINE" 143

of " discipline " in their discussion of the theories
of the method ; but evidently they did not attach
the same meaning to the word as the one I had
been trained to use. This fact led me to meditate
on what I myself really meant by discipline : a
process of definition which, as it always does, clarified
my ideas and proved them in some respects quite
different from what I had thought them.

Discipline means, of course, " the capacity for self-
control." I had no sooner formulated this definition
than I saw that I had been, in my practical use
of the word, omitting half of it, and that the vital
half. It was not discipline I had been vainly seeking
at the Casa dei Bambini, it was compulsion.

Now, compulsion is a force very much handier to
use in education than self-control, since it depends
on the adult and not on the child, and practically
any adult with a club (physical or moral) can compass
it if the child in his power is small enough. But
the most elementary experience of life proves that
the effects of compulsion last exactly as long as the
physical or moral club can be applied. Evidently
its use can scarcely prepare the child for the
searching tests of independent adult life when no
one has any longer even a pseudo-right to club
him into moral action.

And yet self-control, like all other vital processes
of individual life, is tantalizingly elusive and subtle.
My untrained mind, face to face at last with the
real problem, despaired of securing this real self-

144 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

control and not the valueless compulsory obedience
to external force or persuasion with which I had
been confusing it. I saw that it is secured in the
Children's Homes, and betook myself once more to
an examination of their methods.

Their method for solving this problem is like the
ones used in all other problems of child-life. They
use the adult brain to analyse minutely all the
complex process involved, and then they begin at
the beginning to teach the children all the different
actions involved, one after another.

For instance, the capacity for close, consecutive
attention to any undertaking is a very valuable form
of self-control and self-discipline (one which a good
many adults have never mastered). The natural
tendency of childhood, as of all untrained humanity,
is for flightiness, for mental vagrancy, for picking up
and fitfully dropping an enterprise. It is obvious
that the sternest of external so-called discipline
cannot lay a finger on this particular mental fault,
because all it can command is physical obedience,
which ceases when the compulsion is no longer
active. In the Children's Home, the child is provided
with a task so exactly suited to the instinctive needs
of his growing organism, that his own spontaneous
interest in it overcomes his own equally spontaneous
aversion to mental concentration. Later on in life
he must learn to concentrate mentally, whether he
feels a strong spontaneous interest in the subject or
not ; but it is evident that he cannot do that, if he

THE NATURE OF "DISCIPLINE" 145

has not learned first to control his wandering wits
when the subject does interest him. And that this
last is not the perfectly easy undertaking it seems
is apparent when one considers all the hopelessly
flighty women there are in the world who could not,
to save their lives, mentally concentrate on anything.
The Montessori apparatus sets a valuable vital force
in the child's own intellectual make-up to master
an undesirable instinct, and naturally the valuable
force grows stronger with every exercise of its power,
just as a muscle does. The little boy who was so
much interested in his buttoning-frame that he stuck
to his enterprise from beginning to end without
so much as glancing up at the activities of the
other children, showed real self-control, even though
it was not associated with the element of pain
which my grim ancestors led me to think was
essential.

It is true that self-control in the face of pain or
indifference is a necessary element in adult moral
and intellectual life, but it now appears that, like
every other factor in life, it must start from small
beginnings and grow slowly. The buttoning boy
showed not only self-control, but the only variety
of it which a baby is capable of manifesting. When
I had the notion that I ought (for his own good, of
course) to demand of him self-control in the face
of pain, even of a very small pain, I was asking
something which he could not as yet give, and of
which compulsory obedience could only obtain an
10

146 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

empty and misleading appearance, an appearance
really harmful to the child's best interests, since it
completely blinded me to the fact that he had not
made the least beginning towards attaining a real
self-control. He must begin slowly to learn self-
control, as he must begin slowly to learn how to
walk. I am quite satisfied if he takes a single
step at first, because I know that is the essential.
If he can do that, he will ultimately learn to climb
a mountain. If he can overcome the naturally
vagrant impulses of his mind through intellectual
interest (for it is none other) in the completion of
his task of buttoning up the cloth on his frame, he
has begun a mental habit the value of which cannot
be overestimated, and which will later, in its full
development, make it possible for him to master the
calculus without the agonizing, too-tardy effort at
mental self-control which embittered my own struggle
with that subject.

The child has, from time immemorial, always in-
stinctively used in his games and plays this method
of learning self-control and mental concentration as
much as adults would allow him. The admirable
thoroughgoing concentration of a child on a game of
marbles or ball is proverbial ; but while the rest of us,
with some unsystematic exceptions, have looked idly
on at this great natural stream of mental vigour
pouring itself out in profusion before our eyes,
Dr. Montcssori has stepped in with an ingeniously
devised waterwheel and set it to work.

THE NATURE OF "DISCIPLINE" 147

The child in the Casa dei Bambini advances from
one scientifically graded stage of mental self-control
to the next, from the buttoning-frames to the geo-
metric insets, from these to their use in drawing and
the control of the pencil, and then on into the
mastery of the alphabet, always with a greater and
greater control of the processes of his mind.

The control of the processes of his body are learned
in the same analysed, gradual progression from the
easy to the difficult. He learns in the " lesson of
silence " how to do nothing with his body, an accom-
plishment which his fidgety elders have never
acquired ; he learns in all the sensory exercises the
complete control of his five servants, his senses ; and
in moving freely about the furniture suited to his
size, in handling things small enough for him to
manage, in transferring objects from one place to
another, he learns how to go deftly through all the
ordinary operations of everyday life.

And this physical adroitness has a vitally close re-
lation to discipline of all sorts. When we say to
the average, untrained, muscularly uncontrolled child
of four, " Now, do sit still for a while ! " we are
making a request about as reasonable as though we
cried, " Do stand on your head ! " And then we
shake him or reprove him for not obeying what is for
him an impossible command. By so doing we start
in his mind the habit both of not obeying and of
being punished for it ; and as Nature is exuberant in
her protective devices, he very soon grows a fine

148 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

mental callus over his capacity for remorse at not
obeying. The effort required to accede to our
request is too great for him, even if he wholly
understands what we wish, which is often doubtful.
And because he has often been forced to disobey a
command to do something impossible, he falls into
the way of disobeying a command which is within
his powers. The Montessori training makes every
impassioned attempt to teach a child exactly how
to do a thing before he is requested to do it.

We give a child the enormously compendious com-
mand, " Don't be so careless ! ", without reflecting
that it is about as useful and specific an exhortation
as if one should cry to us, " Do be more virtuous ! "
Dr. Montessori is continually admonishing us to use
our grown-up brains to analyse into its component
parts the child's carelessness, so that, part by part, it
can be corrected. Suppose that it has manifested
itself (as it not infrequently does) by a reckless
plunge across the room, carrying a plateful of cookies
which have most of them fallen to the floor by the
end of the trip. Almost without exception, what
we all cry impatiently to a child, even to a very little
child, under those circumstances, is " For mercy's
sake, do look at what you're doing ! " which is, con-
sidered at all analytically, exactly what it is our
business as his leaders and guides in the world to do
for him.

A little reflection on the subject makes us realize,
in spite of the sharpness of our reproof to him, that

THE NATURE OF "DISCIPLINE" 149

he takes no pleasure in spilling the cookies and falling
over the chairs ; that is, that he had no set purpose
to do this, instead of walking correctly across the
room and setting the plate down on the table. The
question we should ask ourselves is obviously, " Why,
then, did he do all those troublesome and careless
things?" Obviously because we were requiring him
to go through a complicated process, the separate
parts of which he has not mastered ; as though a
musician should command us to play the chromatic
scale of D minor, and then blame us for the resultant
discord. He should have taught us a multitude of
things before requiring such a complicated achieve-
ment— how to hold our fingers over the piano-keys,
how to read music, how to play simpler scales.

The child with the cookie-plate needs, in the first
place, a course of exercises in learning to walk in a
straight line directly to the spot where he means to go,
exercises continued until this process becomes auto-
matic, so that the greatest haste on his part will not
send him reeling about, as most children (and a con-
siderable number of their ill-trained elders) do when
they undertake to move from one side of the room to
another.

How can he learn to do this ? Dr. Montessori
suggests drawing a chalk line on the floor and having
the children play the " game " (either with or without
music) of trying to walk along it without stepping
off. I myself, remembering the forbidden joys of
my reckless childhood in walking the top-rail of a

150 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

fence, have tried the expedient of providing a less
dangerous top-rail laid flat on the ground. Did any
healthy child ever need more than one chance to walk
along railway tracks ? The objection in the past to
these exercises has been that they were connected
with something dangerous and undesirable. I do not
blame my parents for forbidding me to try to balance
myself either on the top-rail of a fence or on a
railway track. Both of these were highly risky
diversions. But it does seem odd that neither they
nor I ever thought of providing, in some safe form,
the exercises in equilibrium so violently craved by all
healthy children. A narrow board, or length of so-
called " two-by-four " studding, laid on the ground,
furnishes a diversion as endlessly entertaining for a
child of three as the most dangerously high fence-
rail for an older child, and the never-failing zest with
which a little child practises balancing himself on
this narrow " sidewalk " is a proof that the exercise
is one for which he unconsciously felt a need.

Another trick of equilibrium which is hard for
a little child is to lift one foot from the floor and
perform any action without falling over. If he is
provided with a loose rope-end, hanging where he
can easily reach it, his parent and guardian can sug-
gest any number of entertaining things to do while
his equilibrium is assured by his grasp on the rope.
My experience has been that one suggestion is enough.
The child's invention does the rest. Another exer-
cise which is of great benefit for very little children

THE NATURE OF "DISCIPLINE" 151

is to walk backwards, a process which needs no more
gymnastic apparatus than a helping hand from
father or mother, an apparatus which is equally
effective in teaching a young child the fascinating
game of crossing one foot over the other without
falling down.

Does all this physical training of tiny children seem
too remote from the older child who spilled the
cookies ? He stands at the end of the road over which
the balancing, backward-walking, highly entertained
three-year-old is advancing.

Although it is not mentioned in any Montessori
suggestions I have seen (possibly because of the diffi-
culty of managing it in a schoolroom), it occurred
to me one day that water is a neglected but very
valuable factor in training a little child to accuracy
of muscular movement. This reflection occurred to
me just after I had instinctively led away a little
child from a basin of water in which 1 had " caught
her " dabbling her hands. Making a desperate effort
to put into practice my new resolution to question
myself sharply each time that I denied a child any
activity he seemed to desire, I perceived that in this
case, as so often, I was acting traditionally, without
considering the essential character of the situation.
I could not, of course, allow the child to dabble in
that basin of water there, because she would be apt
to spatter it on the floor and to get her clothes wet.
But on that warm summer day, why could I not set her
outdoors on the grass, with a bit of oilcloth girded

152 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

about her waist so that she should not spoil her
dress ? Her evident interest in the water was an
indication of a natural force which it might be possible
to utilize to give her some muscular training which
would entertain her at the same time. When I really
came to think about it, there was nothing inherently
wicked in playing with water.

For the almost superhuman effort necessary to use
reason about a fact whose outlines are dulled by
familiarity, I was rewarded many times over by the
discovery of a " sensory exercise " which apparently
is of the highest value. The child in question, pro-
vided with a pan of water, and various cups and
jelly-moulds of different sizes, which I snatched at
random from the kitchen-shelf, was in a state of silent
bliss. She filled the little cups up to the brim, she
lifted them with an anxious care which no exhortation
of mine could have induced her to apply, she drank
from them, she poured their contents into each other,
discovering for herself that the smaller ones must be
emptied into the bigger ones and not vice versa, she
filled them again with a spoon, At first she did all
this very clumsily, although always with the most
painstaking care, but as the days went on with repe-
titions of this game, her dexterity became astonish-
ing, as was her eternal interest in the monotonous
proceeding.

Now she is not only kept quiet and happy for
about an hour a day by this amusement, and she has
not only learned to fill and handle her little cups and

THE NATURE OF "DISCIPLINE" 153

jelly-moulds very deftly, but the operation of drinking
out of a. water-glass at the table is of a simplicity
fairly beneath her contempt. I smile to see our
guests gasp and dodge in dismay as, with the reck-
less abandon of her age, she grasps her water-glass
with one hand, not deigning even to look at it, and
conveys it to her lips. But as a matter of fact, no
matter how hastily or carelessly she does this, she
scarcely ever spills a drop. The control of utensils
containing liquids has been so thoroughly learned by
her muscles in the long hours of happy play with her
little cups that it is perfectly automatic. She no
more spills water from her glass than I fall down on
the floor when I cross a room, even though I may be
quite absent-minded about that undertaking.

CHAPTER XI

MORE ABOUT DISCIPLINE WITH SPECIAL REGARD
TO OBEDIENCE

I MUST stop at this point and devote a paragraph
or two to laying the ghost of another Puritan ancestor
who demands, " But where does the discipline come
in here if it is all automatic and unconscious? Why
sneak exactitude of muscular action into the child's
life by the back door, so to speak? Would it not
be better for her moral nature to command her out-
right not to spill the water from her glass at table,
and force her to use her will-power by punishing her
if she does? "

There are several answers to this searching ques-
tion, which is by no means so simple and direct as it
sounds. The most obvious one is the retort brutal,
namely, that a great many generations have experi-
mented with that simple method of training children,
with the result that family life has been considerably
embittered and the children very poorly trained ; in
other words, that practical experience has shown it
to be a very bad method indeed and in use only
because we know no better one.

SPECIAL REGARD TO OBEDIENCE 155

One of the reasons why it is bad is that it con-
fuses two radically different activities in the child's
life, including both under one far too sweeping com-
mand. The child's ability to handle a glass of
water is an entirely different function from its will-
ingness to obey orders. To require of its nascent
capacities at the same instant a new muscular skill
and the moral effort necessary to obey a command is
to invite almost certain failure. Worse than this, and
in fact as bad as anything can be, the result of this
impossibly compendious command is to bring about
a hopeless confusion in the child's mind, which means
unnecessary nervous tension and friction and the
beginning of an utterly deplorable mental habit of
nervous tension and irritated resistance in the child's
mind whenever a command is given. That this in-
stinct of irritated resistance is not a natural one is
proved by the happily obedient older children in the
Casa dei Bambini in Rome. Furthermore, anyone
who will, under ordinary circumstances, try the simple
experiment of asking a little child (too young to
have acquired this bad mental habit) to perform some
operation which he has thoroughly mastered, will be
convinced that obedience in itself involves no pain to
a child.

As to the second demand of my Puritan ancestor,
which runs, " And force her to use her will-power by
punishment," the same flat denial must be given that
proposition. Experience proves that you can prevent
a child from performing some single special action

156 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

by means of external punishment, but that stimu-
lating the proper use of the will-power is something
entirely different. Apparently the will-power is more
apt to be perverted into grotesque and unprofitable
shapes by the use of punishment than to be encouraged
into upright, useful, and vigorous growth.

And here it is well to question our own hearts
deeply to make sure that we really wish, honestly, with-
out mental reservations, to stimulate the will-power of
our children — their will-power, be it remembered, not
our own. Is there in the motives which actuate our
attempts at securing obedience from children a trace
of the animal-trainer's instinct? For, though it is
true that children are little animals, and that they can
be successfully trained by the method of the animal-
trainer, it is not to be forgotten that they are trained
by those methods only to feats of exactly the same
moral and intellectual calibre as those performed by
trick dogs and cats. They are forced to struggle
blindly and wholly without aid towards whatever
human achievements they may later accomplish, with
the added disadvantage of the mental habit either of
sullen dissembled revolt or crushed mental servility,
according to their temperaments.

The end and aim of the horsebreaker's effort is to
create an animal who will obey literally, with no voli-
tion of his own, any command of any human being.
The conscientious parent who faces squarely this
ultimate logical conclusion of the animal-trainer's
system must see that his own aim, being entirely

SPECIAL REGARD TO OBEDIENCE 157

opposed to that, must be attained by very different
means ; and that, since his final goal is to produce a
being wholly and wisely self-governing, the sooner the
child can be induced to begin the exercise of the
faculty of self-government, the more seasoned in ex-
perience it will be when vital things begin to depend
on it.

It is highly probable that in the heart of the
modern parent of the best type, if there is still
some of the animal-trainer's instinct, he is quite and
honestly unconscious of it and would be ashamed of
it if he recognized it. I think most of us can say
sincerely that we have no conscious wish for anything
but the child's best welfare. But in saying this, we
admit at once that our problem is vastly more subtle
and complicated than the horsebreaker's, and that
we arc in need of every ray of light from any source
possible.

The particular vivifying truth which we must
imprint on our minds in this connection is that
spontaneity of action is the absolute prerequisite for
any moral or intellectual advance on the part of
any human being. Nor is this, though so constantly
insisted upon by Dr. Montessori, any new invention
of hers. Dimly felt, it has regulated more or less the
best action of the best preachers, the best teachers
and law-givers, since the beginning of the world.
Pestalozzi formulated it in the hard saying, all the
more poignant because it came from a man who had
devoted himself with such passionate affection to his

158 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

pupils, " I have found that no man in God's wide
earth is able to help any other man. Help must
come from the bosom alone." Froebel, in all his
general remarks on education, states this principle
clearly. Finally, it has been crystallized in the
homely adage of old wives, " Every child's got to
do its own growing."

We will admit the truth of this theory. What is
so startling about Dr. Montessori's attitude towards
it, is that she really acts upon it ! More than that,
she expects us to act on it, all the time, in all the
multiform crises of our lives as parents, in this intri-
cate problem of discipline and the training of the
will-power, as well as in the simpler form of physically
refraining from interfering with the child's efforts to
feed and dress himself.

And yet it is natural enough that we should find
at first sight such general philosophic statements
rather vague and remote, and not at all sufficiently
reassuring as we stand face to face with the problem
of securing obedience from a lively child of three.
We may have seen how we overlooked the obvious
reason why a child who cannot obey a command will
not ; and we may be quite convinced that the first
step in securing both self-control and obedience from
a child is to put the necessary means in his power ;
and yet we may be still frankly at a loss and deeply
apprehensive about what seems the hopeless under-
taking of directly securing obedience even after the
child has learned, how to obey. All that Dr. Montes-

SPECIAL REGARD TO OBEDIENCE 15S

sori has done for us so far is to call our attention to
the fact, which we did not in the least perceive before,
that a child is no more born into the world with a
full-fledged capacity to obey orders, than to do a sum
in arithmetic. But though we agree that we must
first teach him his numbers before expecting him to
add and subtract, how, we ask ourselves anxiously,
can we be in the least sure that he will be willing
to use his numbers to do sums with, that he will be
willing to utilize his careful preparatory training when
it comes to the point of really obeying orders ?

At this juncture I can recommend from successful
personal experience a courageous abandonment of
our traditional attitude of deep distrust towards life
of our mediaeval conviction that desirable traits can
only be hewed painfully out across the grain of human
nature. The old monstrous idea which underlay all
schooling was that the act of educating himself was
fundamentally abhorrent to a child, and that he could
be forced to do it only by external violence. This was
an idea held by more generations of school-teachers
and parents than is at all pleasant to consider, when
one reflects that it would have been swept out upon
the dump-heap of discarded superstitions by one
single unprejudiced survey of one normal child under
normal conditions.

Dr. Montessori, carrying to its full extent a theory
which has been slowly gaining ground in the minds
of all modern enlightened teachers, has been the first
to have the courage to act without reservation on the

160 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

strength of her observation that the child prefers
learning to any other occupation, since the child is
the true representative of our race which does advance,
even with such painful slowness, away from ignorance
towards knowledge. Now, in addition, she tells us just
as forcibly that they prefer right, orderly, disciplined
behaviour to the unregulated disobedience which we
slanderously insist is their natural taste. She informs
us as a result of her scientific and unbiased observa-
tion of child-life that our usual lack of success in
handling the problems of obedience comes because,
while we do not expect a child at two or three or
even four to have mastered completely even the
elements of any other of his activities, we do
expect him to have mastered all the complex mus-
cular, nervous, mental, and moral elements involved
in the act of obedience to a command from outside
his own individuality.

She points out that obedience is evidently a deep-
rooted instinct in human nature, since society is
founded on obedience. Indeed, on the whole, history
seems to show that the average human being has
altogether too much native instinct to obey anyone
who will shout out a command ; and that the advance
from one bad form of government to another only
slightly better is so slow because the mass of grown
men are too much given to obeying almost any
positive order issued to them. Going back to our
surprised recognition of the child as an inheritor of
human nature in its entirety, we must admit that

SPECIAL REGARD TO OBEDIENCE 161

obedience is almost certainly an instinct latent in
children.

The obvious theoretic deduction from this reasoning
is that we need neither persuade nor force a child to
obey, but only clear-sightedly remove the various moral
and physical obstructions which lie in the way of his
obedience, with the confident expectation that his
latent instinct will develop spontaneously in the new
and favourable conditions.

When we plant a bean in the ground we do not
feel that we need to try to force it to grow ; indeed,
we know very well that we can do nothing whatever
about that, since it is governed entirely by the pre-
sence or absence in the seed of the mysterious element
of life ; nor do we feel any apprehension about the
capacity of that smooth, small seed ultimately to
develop into a vine which will climb up the pole we
have set for it, blossom, and bear fruit. We know
that, barring accidents (which it is our business as
gardeners to prevent), it cannot do anything else,
because that is the nature of beans, and we know
all about the nature of beans from a long acquaintance
with them.

We should laugh at an ignorant, city-bred person
gardening for the first time, who, the instant the
two broad cotyledons showed above the ground, began
tying strings to them to induce them to climb his
pole. Our advice to him would be the obvious coun-
sel, " Leave them alone until they grow their tendrils.
You not only can't do any good by trying to induce
II

162 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

those first primitive leaves to climb, but you may hurt
your plant so that it will never develop normally."

The question seems to be, whether we shall have the
courage and good sense to take similar sound advice
from a more experienced and a wiser child-gardener.
Dr. Montessori not only expounds to us theoretically
this doctrine that the child, properly trained, will
spontaneously obey reasonable orders suited to his
age with a prompt willingness which grows with his
growth, but she shows us, in the garden of her schools,
bean-poles wreathed triumphantly with vines to the
very top. Or, to drop a perhaps too-elaborated
metaphor, she shows us children of three or four who
willingly obey suggestions suited to their capacities,
developing rapidly and surely into children of six and
seven whose obedience in all things is a natural and
delightful function of their lives. She not only says
to us, " This theory will work in actual practice," but,
" It has worked. Look at the result ! "

Of course the crux of the matter lies in that phrase,
" proper training." It means years of patient, in-
telligent, faithful effort on the part of the guardian,
to clear away from before the child the different ob-
stacles to the free natural growth of this, as of all
other desirable instincts of human nature. To give
our children this " proper training " it is not enough
to have intellectually grasped the theory of the Mon-
tessori method. With each individual child we have
a fresh problem of its application to him. Our
mother-wits must be sharpened and in constant use.

COUNTING BOXES.

SPECIAL REGARD TO OBEDIENCE 163

Dr. Montessori has only compiled a book of recipes,
which will not feed our families, unless we exert our-
selves, and unless we provide the necessary ingredients
of patience, intelligence, good judgment, and devo-
tion.

The prize which it seems possible to attain by such
efforts makes them, however, worthy of all the time
and thought we may possibly put upon them. Ap-
parently, judging by the results obtained in the Casa
dei Bambini among Italian children, and by Miss
George in her school for American children, there is
no more need for the occasional storms of temper or
outbreaks of exasperated egotism which are so fa-
miliar to all of us who care for children, than there
is for the occasional " fits of indigestion," " feverish-
ness," or " teething-sickness," the almost universal
absence of which in the lives of our scientifically-
reared children so astonishes the older generation.

For the notable success of Miss George's Tarry-
town school disposes once and for all of the theory
that "it may work for Italians, but not with our
naturally self-indulgent, spoiled American children."
Fresh from the Casa dei Bambini in Rome, I visited
Miss George's Children's Home and, except for the
language, would have thought myself again on the
Via Giusti. The same happy, unforced interest in
the work, the same Montessori atmosphere of spon-
taneous life, the same utter unconsciousness of
visitors, the same astonishing industry.

Theoretically, by talk and discussion with experts

164 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

on the subject, and, practically, by the sight of
the astonishing results shown in the enlightenment
and self-mastery of the older children who had been
trained in the system, I was led towards the convic-
tion that children really have not that irresistible
tendency towards naughtiness which my Puritan
blood led me unconsciously to assume, but that their
natural tendency is on the whole to prefer to do what
is best for them ; and I felt as though someone had
tried to prove to me that the world before my eyes
was emancipating itself from the action of some
supposedly inexorable natural law.

Naturally, being an Anglo-Saxon, an inhabitant of
a cold climate, and the descendant of those trouble-
some Puritan forefathers who have interfered so
much with the composition of this book, I could not,
all in a breath, in this dizzying manner lose that firm
conviction of Original Sin which, though no longer
insisted upon openly in the teachings of the Church
(which I no longer attend as assiduously as my parents),
still is, I discovered, a very vital element in my con-
ception of life.

No, the doctrine of Original Sin is in the very
marrow of my New England bones, but, as a lover
of my kind, I rejoice to be convinced of the smallness
of its proportion in relation to other elements of
human nature, and I bear witness gladly that I never
saw or heard of a single case of wilful naughtiness
among all the children in the Casa dei Bambini in
Rome. And though I still cling unreasonably to my

SPECIAL REGARD TO OBEDIENCE 165

superstition that there is, at least in some American
children, an irreducible minimum of the quality which
our country-people picturesquely call " The Old
Harry," I am convinced that there is far, far less
of it than I supposed, and I am overcome with retro-
spective remorse for all the children I have misjudged
in the course of my life.

To put it statistically, I would estimate that out
of every thousand cases of " naughtiness " among
little children, nine hundred and ninety-nine are due
to something else than a " bad " impulse in the child's
heart. Old-wife wisdom has already reduced by
one-half the percentage of infantile wickedness in its
fireside proverb, " Give a young one that's acting bad
something to eat and put him to bed. Half the time
he's tired or starved and don't know what ails him."

It now seems likely that the other half of the time
he is either hungry for intellectual food, weary with
the artificial stimulation of too much mingling with
adult life, or exasperated by perfectly unnecessary
insistence on a code of rules which has really nothing
to do with the question of right or wrong conduct.
When it comes to choosing between really right and
really wrong conduct, apparently the majority of the
child's natural instincts are for the really right, as is
shown by his real preference for the orderly educat-
ing activity of the Children's Home over disorderly
" naughtiness." Our business should be to see to it
that he is given the choice.

CHAPTER XII

DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY OF A UNIVERSAL
ADOPTION OF THE MONTESSORI IDEAS

Now, of course, it is infinitely easier in the first
place to cry out to a child, " Oh, don't be so care-
less ! " than to consider with painful care all the
elements lacking in his training which make him
heedless, and throughout years of conscientious effort
to exercise the ingenuity necessary to supply those
lacking elements. But serious-minded parents do not
and should not expect to find life a flowery bed of
ease, and it is my conviction that most of us will
welcome with heartfelt joy any possible solution
of our desperately pressing problems, even if it in-
volves the process of oiling and setting in motion
the little-used machinery of our brains.

I am opposed in this optimistic conviction by that
small segment of the circle of my acquaintances com-
posed of the doctors whom I happen to know person-
ally. They take a gloomy view of the matter, and
tell me that their experience with human nature
leads them to fear that the rules of moral and in-
tellectual hygiene for children of this new system,

1 66

DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY 167

excellent though they are, will be observed with as
little faithfulness as the equally wise rules of physical
hygiene for adults which the doctors have been
endeavouring vainly to make us adopt. They inform
me that they have learned that, if obedience to the
laws of hygiene requires continuous effort, day after
day, people will not obey them, even though by
so doing they would avoid the pains and maladies
which they so dread. " People will take pills,"
physicians report, " but they will not take exercise.
If your new system told them of some one or two
supreme actions which would benefit their children,
quite a number of parents would strain every nerve
to accomplish the necessary feats. But what you
are telling them is only another form of what we
cry so vainly, namely, that they themselves must
observe Nature and follow her laws, and that no
action of their doctors, wise though they may
be, can vicariously perform this function for them.
You will see that your Dr. Montessori's exhortation
will have as little effect as those of any other phy-
sician."

I confess that at first I was somewhat cast down
by these pessimistic prophecies, for even a casual
glance over any group of ordinary acquaintances
shows only too much ground for such conclusions.
But a more prolonged scrutiny of just such a casually
selected group of acquaintances, and a little more
searching inquiry into the matter has brought out
facts which lead to more encouraging ideas,

168 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

In the first place, the doctors are scarcely correct
when they assume that they have always been the
repository of a wisdom which we laity have obstin-
ately refused to take over from them. Comparatively
speaking, it is only yesterday that the doctors them-
selves outgrew the idea that pills were the divinely
appointed cures for all ills. So recent is this revo-
lution in ideas that there are still left among us in
eddies, out of the main stream, elderly doctors who
lay very little of the modern fanatical stress on diet,
and burn very little incense before the modern altar
of fresh air and exercise. It seems early in the day
to conclude that the majority of mankind will not
take good advice if it is offered them, a sardonic con-
clusion disproved by the athletic clubs all over the
country, the sleeping-porches burgeoning out from
large and small houses, the millions of barefooted
children in rompers, the regiments of tennis-playing
adolescents and golf-playing elders, the myriads of
diet-studying housewives, the gladly accepted army
of trained nurses. We may not do as well as we
might, but we certainly have not turned deaf ears to
all the exhortations of reason and enlightenment.

Furthermore, beside the fact that doctors have been
preaching "hygiene against drugs" to us only a
short time, it is to be borne in mind that, as a class,
they do not add to their many noble and glorious
qualities of mind ,and heart a very ardent proselytiz-
ing fervour. It seems to be against the " tempera-
ment" of the profession. If you go to a doctor's office,

DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY 169

and consult him professionally, he will, it is true, tell
you nowadays not to take pills, but to take plenty
of exercise and sleep, to eat moderately, avoid worry,
and drink plenty of pure water ; but you do not ever
run across him preaching these doctrines from a
barrel-head on the street-corner, to all who will hear.
The traditional dignity of his profession forbids such
Salvation Army methods. The doctors of a town are
apt, prudently, to boil the water used in their own
households and to advise this course of action to any
who seek their counsel, rather than to band together
in an aggressive, united company and make themselves
disagreeably conspicuous by clamouring insistently at
the primaries and polls for better water for the town.
It is perhaps not quite fair to accuse us laity of
obstinacy in refusing advice which has been offered
with such gentlemanly reserve.

Then, there is the obvious fact that doctors, like
lawyers, see professionally only the ailing or mal-
contents of the human family, and they suffer from
a tendency common to us all, to generalize from the
results of their own observation. Our own observa-
tion of our own community may quite honestly lead
us to the opposite of their conclusions, namely, that
it is well worth while to make every effort for the
diffusion of theories which tend to improve daily life,
since, on the whole, people seem to have picked
up very quickly indeed the reasonable doctrine of
the prevention of illness by means of healthy lives.
If they have done this, and are, to all appearances,

170 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

trying hard to learn more about the process, it is
reasonable to hope that they will catch at a similar
reasonable mental and moral hygiene for their chil-
dren, and that they will learn to leave off the un-
necessary mental and moral restrictions, the unwise
interference with the child's growth and undue insis-
tence on conformity to adult ideas of regularity, just
as they have learned how to leave off the innumer-
able layers of starched petticoats, the stiff, scratchy
pantalets, and the close, smothering sun-bonnets in
which our loving and devoted great-grandmothers
required our grandmothers to grow up.

Lastly, there is a vital element in the situation
which is perhaps not sufficiently considered by people
anxious to avoid the charge of sentimentality. This
element is the strength of parental affection, perhaps
the strongest and most enduring passion which falls
to the lot of ordinary human beings. Only a Napo-
leon can carry ambition to the intensity of a passion.
Great, overmastering love between man and woman
is not so common as our romantic tradition would
have us believe. In the world of religion, saints are
few and far between. Most of us manage to live
without being consumed by the reforming fever of
those rare souls who suffer under injustice to others
as though it were practised on themselves. But
nearly every house which contains children shelters
also two human beings, the hard crust of whose
natural egotism and moral sloth has been at least
cracked by the shattering force of this primeval

DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY 171

passion for their young; two human beings, who, no
matter how low their position in the scale of human
ethical development, have in them to some extent
that divine capacity for willing self-sacrifice which
comes, under other conditions, only to the rarest and
most spiritual-minded members of the race. It is not
sentimentality, but a simple statement of fact, to say
that there is in parents who take care of their own
children (as most American parents do) a natural
fund of energy, patience, and willingness to undergo
self-discipline, which cannot be counted upon in any
other numerous class of people. The Montessori
system, with its fresh, vivid presentation of axiomatic
truths, with a fervent hope of a practical application
of them to the everyday life of every child, addresses
itself to these qualities in parents ; and, for the sound
development of its fundamental idea of self-education
and self-government, trusts not only to the wise
conclaves of professional pedagogues, but to the
co-operation of the fathers and mothers of the world.

CHAPTER XIII

IS THERE ANY REAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
THE MONTESSORI SYSTEM AND THE KINDER-
GARTEN ?

No one realizes more acutely than I that the com-
position of this chapter presupposes an amount of
courage on my part which it is perhaps hardly ex-
aggeration to call foolhardiness. That I am really
venturing upon a battleground is evident to me from
the note of rather fierce anticipatory disapproval
which I hear in the voice of everyone who asks me
the question which heads this chapter. It is always
accented " Is there any real difference between the
Montessori system and the kindergarten ? " with the
evident design of forcing a negative answer.

Oddly enough, the same reluctance to grant the
possibility of anything new in the Italian method
characterizes the attitude of those who intensely
dislike the kindergartens, as well as that of its
devoted adherents. People who consider the kinder-
garten " all sentimental, enervating twaddle " ask the
question with a truculent tone which makes their
query mean, " This new system is just the same sort

172

DIFFERENCE FROM KINDERGARTEN 173

of nonsense, isn't it now ? " ; while those who feel that
the kindergarten is one of the vital, purifying, and
uplifting forces in modern society evidently use the
question as a means of stating, " It can't be anything
different from the best kindergarten ideas, for they
are the best possible."

I have seen too much beautiful kindergarten work
and have too sincere an affection for the sweet and
pure character of Froebel to have much community
of feeling with the rather brutal negations of the first
class of inquirers. If they can see nothing in kinder-
gartens but the sentimentality which is undoubtedly
there, but which cannot possibly, even in the most
exaggerated manifestations of it, vitiate all the finely
uplifting elements in those institutions, it is of no use
to expect from them an understanding of a system
which, like the Froebelian, rests ultimately upon a
religious faith in the strength of the instinct for
perfection in the human race.

It is therefore largely for the sake of people like
myself, with a natural sympathy for the kindergarten,
that I am setting out upon the difficult undertaking
of stating what in my mind are the differences
between a Froebelian and a Montessori school for
infants.

I must begin by saying that there are a great
many resemblances, as is inevitable, in the case of
two methods which work upon the same material-
children from three to six. And of course it is hardly
necessary formally to admit that the ultimate aim of

174 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

the two educators is alike, because the aim which is
common to them — an ardent desire to do the best
thing possible for the children without regard for
the convenience of the adults who teach them — is the
sign-manual throughout all the ages, from Plato and
Quintilian down, which distinguishes the educator
from the mere school-teacher.

There are a good many differences in the didactic
apparatus and use of it, some of which are too
technical to be treated fully here, such as the fact
that Froebel, moved by his own extreme interest in
crystals and their forms, provides a number of exer-
cises for teaching children the analysis of geometrical
forms, whereas Dr. Montessori thinks it best not
to undertake this with children so young. Kinder-
garten children are not taught reading and writing,
and Montessori children are. Kindergarten children
learn more about the relations of wholes to parts
in their " number work," while in the Casa dei
Bambini there is more attention paid to numbers in
their series.

There are, of course, many other differences in
technique and apparatus, such as might be expected
in two systems founded by educators separated from
each other by the passage of sixty years and by a
difference in race as well as by training and environ-
ment. This is especially true in regard to the greater
emphasis laid by Dr. Montessori on the careful, minute
observation of the children before and during any
attempt to instruct them. Trained as she has been

DIFFERENCE FROM KINDERGARTEN 175

in the severely unrelenting rules for exactitude of the
positive sciences, in which intelligent observation is
elevated to the position of the cardinal virtue neces-
sary to intellectual salvation, her instinct, strengthened
since then by much experience, was to give herself
plenty of time always to examine the subject of her
experimentation. Just as a scientific horticulturist
observes minutely the habits of a plant before he
tries a new fertilizer on it, and after he has made the
experiment goes on observing the plant with even
more passionately absorbed attention, so Dr. Mon-
tessori trains her teachers to take time, all they need,
to observe the children before, during, and after any
given exercise. This is, of course, the natural instinct
of Froebel, of every born teacher, but the routine of
the average school or kindergarten gives the teacher
only too few minutes for it, certainly not the long
hours necessary.

On the other hand, even in the details of the
technique, there is much similarity between the two
systems. Some of the kindergarten blocks are used
in Montessori " sensory exercises." In both insti-
tutions the ideal, seldom attained as yet, is for the
systematic introduction of gardening and the care
of animals. In both, the children play games and
dance to music ; some regular kindergarten games
are used in the Casa dei Bambini ; in both schools
the first aim is to make the children happy ; in
neither are they reproved or punished. Both systems
bear in every detail the imprint of extreme love and

I

176 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

reverence for childhood. And yet the moral atmo-
sphere of a kindergarten is as different from that of a
Casa dei Bambini as possible, and the real truth of
the matter is that the one is actually and fundamentally
opposed to the other.

To explain this a few words of comment on
Froebel, his life, and the subsequent fortunes of
his ideas may be useful. These facts are so well
known, owing to the universal respect and affection
for this great benefactor of childhood, that the
merest mention of them will suffice. The dates of
his birth and death are significant, 1782-1852, as
is a brief bringing to mind of the intensely German
Protestant piety of his surroundings. He died sixty
years ago, and a great deal of educational water has
flowed under school bridges since then. He died
before anyone dreamed of modern scientific labora-
tories, such as those in which the Italian educator
received her sound, practical training, a training
which not only put at her disposition an amount of
accurate information about the subject of her in-
vestigation which would have dazzled Froebel, but
formed her in the fixed habit of inductive reasoning
which has made possible the brilliant achievements of
modern positive sciences, and which was as little
common in Froebel's time as the data on which it
works. That he felt instinctively the need for this
solid foundation is shown by his craving for instruc-
tion in the natural sciences, his absorption of all the
scanty information within his reach, his subsequent

DIFFERENCE FROM KINDERGARTEN 177

deep meditation upon this information, and his
attempts to generalize from it.

Another factor in Froebel's life which scarcely
exists nowadays was the tradition of physical vio-
lence and oppression towards children. That this
has gradually disappeared from the ordinary civilized
family is partly due to the general trend away
from physical oppression of all sorts, and partly to
Froebel's own softening influence, for which we can
none of us feel too fervent a gratitude. He was
forced to devote much of his energy to combating
this tendency, which was not a factor at all in the
problems which confronted Dr. Montessori.

Some time after his death his ideas began to spread
abroad, not only in Europe (the kindergartens of
which I know nothing about, except that they are
very successful and numerous), but also in the
United States, about whose numerous and success-
ful kindergartens we all know a great deal. The
new system was taken up by teachers who were
intensely American, and hence strongly characterized
by the American quality of force of individuality.
It is a universally accepted description of American
women (sometimes intended as a compliment, some-
times as quite the reverse) that, whatever else they
are, they are less negative, more forceful, more
direct, endowed with more positive personalities than
the women of other countries. These women, full of
energy, quivering with the resolution to put into
full practice all the ideas of the German educator
12

178 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

whose system they espoused, " organized a cam-
paign for kindergartens" which, with characteristic
thoroughness, determination, and devotion, they have
carried through to high success.

They and the educators among men who became
interested in the Froebelian ideas have been by no
means willing to consider all advance impossible
because the founder of the system was no longer
with them. They have been progressively and
intelligently unwilling to let 1852 mark the culmina-
tion of kindergarten improvement, and they have
changed and patched and added to and taken away
from the original method, as their best judgment and
the increasing scientific data about children enabled
them. This process, it goes without saying, has not
taken place without a certain amount of friction.
Naturally, everyone's " best judgment " scarcely coin-
cided with that of everyone else. There have been
honest differences of opinion about the interpretation
of scientific data. True to its nature as an essen-
tially religious institution, the kindergarten has under-
gone schisms, been rent with heresies, been divided
into orthodox and heterodox, into liberals and con-
servatives ; although the whole body of the work has
gone constantly forward, keeping pace with the in-
creasing modern preoccupation with childhood.

Indeed, it seems to me that one may say without
being considered unsympathetic that it has now cer-
tain other aspects of a popular, prosperous religious
sect, among which is a feeling of instinctive jealousy

DIFFERENCE FROM KINDERGARTEN 179

of similar regenerating influences which have their
origin outside the walls of the original orthodox
church.

Undoubtedly kindergarteners have some excuse in
the absurdly exaggerated current reports and rumours
of the miracles accomplished by the Montessori
apparatus ; but it seems to outsiders that what we
have a right to expect from the heads of the
organized established kindergarten movement is an
open-minded, unbiased, and extremely minute and
thorough investigation of the new ideas, rather
than an inspection of popular reports and a resultant
condemnation. It is because I am as much con-
cerned as I am astonished at this attitude on their
part that I am venturing upon the following slight
and unprofessional discussion of the differences
between the typical kindergarten and the typical
Casa dei Bambini.

To begin with, kindergarteners are quite right
when they cry out that there is nothing new in the
idea of self-education, and that Froebel stated as
plainly as Montessori does that the aim of all educa-
tion is to waken voluntary action in the child.
For that matter, what educator worthy of the name
has not felt this? The point seems to be, not that
Froebel states this vital principle any less clearly,
but so much less forcibly than the Italian educator.
Not foreseeing the masterful women, with highly
developed personalities, who were to be the apostles
of his ideas in America, and not being surrounded

180 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

by the insistence on the value of each individuality
which marks our modern moral atmosphere, it did
not occur to him, apparently, that there was any
special danger in this direction. For, of course, our
modern high estimate of the value of individuality
results not only in a vague though growing realiza-
tion of the importance of safeguarding the nascent
personalities of children, but in a plenitude of
strongly marked individualities among the adults
who teach children, and in a fixed habit of using the
strength of this personality as a tool to attain desired
ends.

The difference in this respect between the two
educators may perhaps be stated fancifully in the
following way. Froebel gives his teachers, among
many other maxims to hang up where they may be
constantly in view, a statement running somewhat
in this fashion : " All growth must come from a
voluntary action of the child himself." Dr.
Montessori not only puts this maxim first and fore-
most and exhorts her teachers to bear it incessantly
in mind during the consideration of any and all other
maxims, but she may be supposed to wish it printed
thus: "All growth must come from a VOLUNTARY
action of the child HIMSELF."

The first thing she requires of a directress in her
school is a complete avoidance of the centre of the
stage, a self-annihilation, the very desirability (not
to mention the possibility) of which has never
occurred to the kindergarten teacher, whose usual

DIFFERENCE FROM KINDERGARTEN 181

position is in the middle of a ring of children
with every eye on her, with every sensitive, budding
personality receiving the strongest possible impres-
sions from her own adult individuality. Without the
least hesitation or doubt she has always considered
that her part is to make that individuality as perfect
and lovable as possible, so that the impression the
children get from it may be desirable. The idea that
she is to keep herself strictly in the background for
fear of unduly influencing some childish soul which
has not yet found itself is an idea totally unheard of.

I find in a catalogue of kindergarten material this
sentence in praise of some new device : " It obviates
the need of supervision on the part of the teacher as
far as is consistent with conscientious child-training."
Now, the Montessori ideal is a device which shall be
so entirely self-corrective that absolutely no inter-
ference by the teacher is necessary as long as the
child is occupied with it. I find in that sentence the
keynote of the difference between the two systems.
In the kindergarten the emphasis is laid, consciously
or unconsciously, but very practically always, on
the fact that the teacher teaches. In the Casa dei
Bambini the emphasis is all on the fact that the
child learns.

In the beginning of her study the kindergarten
teacher is instructed, it is true, as a philosophic
consideration, that Pestalozzi held and Froebel
accepted the dictum that, just as the cultivator
creates nothing in his trees and plants, so the

182 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

educator creates nothing in the children under his
care. This is duly set down in her notebook, but the
apparatus given her to work with, the technique taught
her, what she sees of the work of other teachers, the
whole tendency of her training goes to accentuate
what is already racially strong in her temperament, a
fixed conviction of her own personal and individual
responsibility for what happens about her. She
feels keenly (in the case of nervous constitutions,
crushingly) the weight of this responsibility, really
awful when it is felt about children. She has the
quick, energetic, American instinct to do something
herself at once to bring about a desired condition.
She is the swimmer who does not trust heartily and
wholly to the water to keep him up, but who stiffens
his muscles and exhausts himself in the attempt by
his own efforts to float. Indeed, that she should be
required above all things to do nothing, not to
interfere, is almost intellectually inconceivable to
her.

This, of course, is a generalization as inaccurate
as all generalizations are. There are some kinder-
garten teachers with great natural gifts of spiritual
divination, strengthened by the experiences of their
beautiful lives, who feel the inner trust in life which
is so consoling and uplifting to the Montessori
teacher. But the average American kindergarten
teacher, like all the rest of us average Americans,
needs the calming and quieting lesson taught by the
great Italian educator's reverent awe for the spon-

DIFFERENCE FROM KINDERGARTEN 183

taneous, ever-upward, irresistible thrust of the mi-
raculous principle of growth.

In spite of the horticultural name of her school
the ordinary kindergarten teacher has never learned
the wholehearted, patient faith in the long, slow
processes of nature which characterizes the true
gardener. She is not penetrated by the realization of
the vastness of the forces of the human soul, she
is not subdued and consoled by a calm certainty
of the Tightness of natural development. She is far
gayer with her children than the Montessori teacher,
but she is really less happy with them because, in
her heart of hearts, she trusts them less. She feels
a restless sense of responsibility for each action of
each child. It is doubtless this difference in mental
attitude which accounts for the physical difference
of aspect between our pretty, smiling, ever-active,
always beckoning, nervously conscientious kinder-
garten teacher, always on exhibition, and the calm,
unhurried tranquillity of the Montessori directress,
always unobtrusively in the background.

The latter is but moving about from one little
river of life to another, lifting a sluice-gate here
for a sluggish nature, constructing a dam there to
help a too impetuous nature to concentrate its
forces, and much of the time occupied in quietly
observing, quite at her leisure, the direction of the
channels being constructed by the different streams.
The kindergarten teacher tries to do this, but she
seems obsessed with the idea, unconscious for the

184 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

most part, that it is, after all, her duty to manage
somehow to increase the flow of the little rivers by
pouring into them some of her own superabundant
vital force. In her commendable desire to give her-
self and her whole life to her chosen work she con-
ceives that she is lazy if she ever allows herself
a moment of absolute leisure and unoccupied, im-
personal observation of the growth of the various
organisms in her garden. She must be always help-
ing them grow ! Why else is she there ?, she demands,
with a wrinkled brow of nervous determination to
do her duty, and with the most honest, hurt surprise
at any criticism of her work.

It is possible that this tendency in American
kindergartens is not only a result of the American
temperament, but is inherent in Froebel's original
conception of the kindergarten as the place where
the child gets his real social training, as opposed to
the home where he gets his individual training.
Standing midway between Fichte with his hard
dictum that the child belongs wholly to the State and
to society, and Pestalozzi's conviction that he belongs
wholly to the family, Froebel thought to make
a working compromise by dividing up the bone of
contention, leaving the child in the family most of
the time, but giving him definite social training at
definite hours every day.

Now, there is bound to be, in such an effort, some
of the same danger as is involved in a conception
of religious life which ordains that it shall be lived

DIFFERENCE FROM KINDERGARTEN 185

chiefly between half-past ten and noon on every
Sunday morning. It may very well happen that a
child does not feel social some morning between nine
and eleven, but would prefer to pursue some indi-
vidual enterprise. It may be said that the slight
moral coercion involved in insisting that he join
in one of the group games or songs of the kinder-
garten is only good discipline, but the fact remains
that coercion has been employed, even though coated
with sweet and coaxing persuasion, and the picture
of itself conceived by the kindergarten as a place
for the spontaneous flowering of the social instinct
among children has in it some slight pretence. In the
Casa dei Bambini, on the other hand, the children
learn the rules and conditions of social life as we
must all learn them, and in the only way we all learn
them, and that is by living socially.

The kindergarten teacher, set the task of seeing
that a given number of children engage in social
enterprises practically all the time during a given
number of hours every day, can hardly be blamed
if she is convinced that she must act upon the
children nearly every moment, since she is required
to round them up incessantly into the social corral.
The long hours of the Montessori school and the
freedom of the children, living their own everyday
lives as though they were (as indeed they are) in
their own home, make a vital difference here. The
children, in conducting their individual lives in com-
pany with others, are reproducing the actual con-

186 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

ditions which govern social life in the adult world.
They learn to defer to each other, to obey rules,
even to rise to the moral height of making rules,
to sink temporarily their own interests in the com-
mon weal, not because it is " nice " to do this, not
because an adored, infallible, lovely teacher supports
the doctrine by her unquestioned authority, not
because they are praised and petted when they do,
but (and is not this the real grim foundation of laws
for social organization ?) because they find they
cannot live together at all without rules which all
respect and obey.

In other words, when there is some real occasion
for formulating or obeying a law which facilitates
social life, they formulate it and obey it from an
inward conviction, based on genuine circumstances
of their own lives, that they must do so, or life would
not be tolerable for any of them ; and when there is
no genuine occasion for their making this really
great sacrifice for the common weal, they are left,
as we all desire to be left, to the pursuit of their
own lives. No artificial occasion for this sacrifice
is manufactured by the routine of the school — an
artificial occasion which is apt to be resented by the
stronger spirits among children even as young as
those of kindergarten age. They feel, as we all do,
that there is nothing intrinsically sacred or valuable
about the compromises necessary to attain peaceable
social life, and that they should not be demanded
of us except when necessary. Crudely stated,

DIFFERENCE FROM KINDERGARTEN 187

Froebel's purpose seems to have been that the child
should, in two or three hours at a given time every
day, do his social living and have done with it. And
although this statement is both unsympathetic and
incomplete, there is in it the germ of a well-founded
criticism of the method which many of us have
vaguely felt, although we have not been able to
formulate it before studying the principles of a
system which seems to avoid this fault.

A conversation I had in Rome with an Italian
friend not in sympathy with the Montessori ideas
illustrates another phase of the difference between
the average kindergarten and the Casa dei Bambini.
My friend is a quick, energetic, positive woman who
" manages " her two children with a competent ease
which seems the most conclusive proof that her
methods need no improvement. " Oh no, the Case
dei Bambini are quite failures," she told me. " The
children themselves don't like them." I recalled the
room full of blissful babies which I had come to
know so well, and looked, I daresay, some of the
amused incredulity I felt, for she went on hastily,
" Well, some children may. Mine never did. I had
to put both the boy and the girl back into a kinder-
garten. My little Ida summed up the whole matter.
She said, ' Isn't it queer how they treat you at a
Casa dei Bambini ! They ask me, " Now which would
you like to do, Ida, this or this?" It makes me
feel so queer. I want somebody to tell me what to
do!"'

188 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

My friend went on to generalize, quite sure of
her ground, "That's the sweet and natural child
instinct — to depend on adults for guidance. That's
how children are, and all the Dr. Montessoris in the
world can't change them."

The difference between that point of view and
Dr. Montessori's is the fundamental difference be-
tween the belief in aristocracy and the value of
authority for its own sake which still lingers among
conservatives even in our day, and the wholehearted
belief in democracy which is growing more and more
pronounced among most of our thinkers.

Ida is being trained under her mother's masterful
eye to carry on docilely what an English writer has
called " the dogmatic method with its demand for
mechanical obedience and its pursuit of external
results." She is acquiring rapidly the habit of stand-
ing still until somebody tells her what to do, and
she has already acquired an unquestioning acqui-
escence in the illimitable authority of somebody else,
anyone who will speak positively enough to regulate
her life in all its details. In other words, a finely
consistent little slave is being manufactured out of
Ida, and if in later years she should develop more
of her mother's forcefulness, it will waste a great
deal of its energy in a wild, unregulated revolt
against the chains of habit with whfch she finds her-
self loaded, and in the end will probably wreak itself
on crushing the individuality out of her children in
their turn.

INSETS AROUND WHICH THE CHILD DRAWS, AND THEN FILLS IN
THE OUTLINE WITH COLOURED CRAYONS

DIFFERENCE FROM KINDERGARTEN 189

Sweet little four-year-old Ida, freed for a moment
from the twilight cell of her passive obedience, and
blinking pitifully in the free daylight of the Casa dei
Bambini, is a figure which has lingered long in my
memory, and has been one of the factors inducing
me to undertake the perhaps too ambitious enterprise
of writing this book.

In still another way the Montessori insistence on
spontaneity of the children's action safeguards them,
it seems to me, against one of the greatest dangers
of kindergarten life, and obviates one of the justest
criticisms of the American development of Froebel's
method, namely, over-stimulation and mental fatigue.
When I first thoroughly grasped this fundamental
difference, I was reminded of the saying of a wise
old doctor who, when I was an intense, violently
active girl of seventeen, had given me some sound
advice about how to lift the little children with
whom I happened to be playing. " Don't take hold
of their hands to swing them round ! " he cried to
me. " You can't tell when the strain may be too
great for their little bones and tendons. You may
do them a serious hurt. Have them take hold of
your hands ! And when they're tired, they'll let go."

It now seems to me that in the kindergarten the
teachers are the ones who take hold of the children's
hands, and in the Casa dei Bambini it is the other
way about. What Dr. Montessori is always crying
to her teachers is just the exhortation of my old
doctor. What she is endeavouring to contrive is a

190 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

system which allows the children to "let go" when
they themselves, each at a different time, feel the
strain of effort. The kindergarten teacher is making
all possible conscientious efforts to train herself to
an impossible achievement, namely, to know (what,
of course, she never can know with certainty) when
each child loses his spontaneous interest in his
exercise or game. She is as genuinely convinced as
the Montessori directress that she must "let go"
at that moment, but she is not trained so to take
hold of the child that he himself makes that all-
important decision.

It is true that the best kindergarteners learn from
years of experience (which involves making mistakes
on a good many children) about when, in general,
to let go ; but not the most inspired teacher can
tell, as the child himself does, when the strain is
first felt in the immature, undeveloped brain. And
it is this margin of possibility of mistake on the part
of the best kindergarten teachers which results only
too frequently, with our nervous, too responsive Ameri-
can children, in the flushed faces and unnaturally
bright eyes of the little ones who return to us after
their happy, happy morning in the kindergarten,
unable to eat their luncheons, unable to take their
afternoon naps, quivering between laughter and
tears, and finding very dull the quiet peace of the
home life.

This observation finds any amount of confirma-
tory evidence in the astonishingly great diversity

DIFFERENCE FROM KINDERGARTEN 191

in mental application among children when really
left to their own devices. There is no telling how
long or how short a time any given play or game
will hold their attention, and both kindergarteners
and Montessori teachers agree that it is of value
only so long as it really does genuinely hold their
attention. Some children are interested only so
long as they must struggle against obstacles, and,
once the enterprise runs smoothly, have no further
use for it. With others, the pleasure seems to in-
crease a hundredfold when they are once sure of
their own ability.

For it is by no means true that the kindergarten
teacher is always apt to continue a given game or
exercise too long. It is only too long for some
of the children. There are apt to be others whom
she deprives, by her discontinuation of the game, of
an invigorating exercise which they crave with all
their might, and which they would continue if left
free to follow their own inclination ten times longer
than she would dare to think of asking them to do.
The pertinacity of children in some exercise which
happens exactly to suit their needs is one of the
inevitable surprises to people observing them care-
fully for the first time. Since my attention has
been called to it, I have observed this crazy perse-
verance on unexpected occasions in all children act-
ing freely. Not long ago a child of mine conceived
the idea of climbing up on an easy-chair, tilting
herself over the arm, sliding down into the seat

192 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

on her head, and so off in a sprawling heap on
the floor. I began to count the number of times
she went through this extremely violent, fatiguing,
and as far as I could see, uninteresting exercise,
and was fairly astounded by her obstinacy in stick-
ing to it. She had done it thirty-four times with
unflagging zest, shouting and laughing to herself,
and was apparently going on indefinitely when, to
my involuntary relief, she was called away to supper.
In Rome I remember watching a little boy going
through the exercises with the wooden cylinders
of different sizes which fit into [corresponding holes
(page 71). He worked away with a busy, serene,
absorbed industry, running his forefinger round the
cylinders and then round the holes until he had
them all fitted in. Then, with no haste, but with
no hesitation, he emptied them all out and began
over again. He did this so many times that I felt an
impatient fatigue at the sight of the laborious little
creature, and turned my attention elsewhere. I had
counted up to the fourteenth repetition of his feat
before I stopped watching him, and when I glanced
back again, a quarter of an hour later, he was still at
it. All this was, of course, without a particle of that
" minimum amount of supervision consistent with con-
scientious child-training." He was his own super-
visor, thanks to the self-corrective nature of the
apparatus he was using. If he put a cylinder in the
wrong hole he discovered it himself and was forced
to think out for himself what the trouble was.

DIFFERENCE FROM KINDERGARTEN 198

Dr. Montessori says (and I can easily believe her
from my own experience) that nothing is harder for
even the most earnest and gifted teachers to learn
than that their duty is not to solve all the difficulties
in the way of the children, or even to smooth these
out as much as possible, but, on the contrary, ex-
pressly to see to it that each child is kept constantly
supplied with difficulties and obstacles suitable to
his strength.

A kindergarten teacher tries faithfully to teach
her children so that they will not make errors in their
undertakings. She holds herself virtually respon-
sible for this. With a Puritan conscientiousness she
blames herself if they do make mistakes, if they do
not understand, by grasping her explanation, all the
inwardness of the process under consideration, and
she repeats her explanations with unending patience
until she thinks they do. The Montessori teacher,
on the other hand, confines herself to pointing out
to the child what the enterprise before him is. She
does not, it is true, drop down before him the material
for the Long Stair and leave him to guess what is
to be done with it. She herself constructs the edifice
which is the goal desired. She makes sure that he
has a clear concept of what the task is, and then
she mixes up the blocks and leaves him to work out
his own salvation by the aid of the self-corrective
material.

Dr. Montessori has a great many amusing stories
to tell of her first struggles with her teachers to
13

194 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

make them realize her point of view. Some of them
became offended, and resolved, since they were not
allowed to help the children, to do nothing at all for
them, a resolution which resulted naturally is a state
of things worse than the first. It was very hard for
them to learn that it was their part to set the
machinery of an exercise in motion and then let
the child continue it himself. I quite appreciate the
difficulty of learning the distinction between direct-
ing the children's activity and teaching them each
new step of every process. My own impulse made
me realize the truth of Dr. Montessori's laughing
picture of the teacher's instinctive rush to the aid
of some child puzzling over the geometric insets, and
I knew, from having gone through many profuse,
voluble, vague explanations myself, that what they
always said was, " No, no, dear ; you're trying to
put the round one in the square hole. See, it has
no corners. Look for a hole that hasn't any corners,"
etc. It was not until I had sat by a child, re-
straining myself by a violent effort of self-control
from " correcting " his errors, and had seen the
calm, steady, untiring, hopeful perseverance of his
application, untroubled and unconfused by adult
" aid," that I was fully convinced that my impulse
was to meddle, not to aid. And I admit that I have
many backslidings still.

Half playfully and half earnestly I am continu-
ally quoting to myself the curious quatrain of the
Earl of Lytton, a verse which I think may serve as

DIFFERENCE FROM KINDERGARTEN 195

a whimsical motto for all of us energetic American
mothers and kindergarteners who may be trying to
learn more self-restraint in our relations with little
children :

Since all that I can do for thee
Is to do nothing, this my prayer must be,
That thou mayst never guess nor ever see
The all-endured, this nothing-done costs me.

CHAPTER XIV

MORAL TRAINING

A PERUSAL of the methods of the Montessori
schools and of the philosophy underlying them may
lead the reader to question if under this new system
the child is regarded as a creature with muscular
and intellectual activities only and without a soul.
While the sternest sort of moral training is given
to the parent or teacher who attempts to use the
Montessori system, apparently very little is addressed
directly to the child.

Nothing could more horrify the founder of the
system than such an idea. No modern thinker could
possibly be more penetrated with reverence for the
higher life of the spirit than she, or could bear its
needs more constantly in mind.

Critics of the method who claim that it makes no
direct appeal to the child's moral nature, and tends
to make of him a little egotist bent on self-develop-
ment only, have misapprehended the spirit of the
whole system.

One answer to such a criticism is that conscious
moral existence, the voluntary following of spiritual

196

MORAL TRAINING 197

law, being by far the rarest, highest, and most difficult
achievement in human life, is the one which develops
latest, requires the longest and most careful pre-
paration and the most mature powers of the
individual. It is not only unreasonable to expect
in a little child much of this conscious struggle
toward the good, but it is utterly futile to attempt to
force it prematurely into existence. It cannot be
done, any more than a six-months baby can be forced
to an intellectual undertaking of even the smallest
dimensions.

As a matter of fact, a normal child under six is
mostly a little egotist bent on self-development, and
to develop himself is the best thing he can do, both
for himself and others, just as the natural business of
a healthy child under a year of age is to extract all
the physical profit possible out of the food, rest, care,
and exercise given him. And yet, even here, the
line between the varieties of growth — physical,
intellectual, and moral — is by no means hard and fast.
The six-months baby, although living an almost
exclusively physical life, in struggling to co-ordinate
the muscles of his two arms so that he can seize a
rattle with both hands, is battling for the mastery
of his brain-centres, just as the three-year-old, who
leads a life composed almost entirely of physical and
intellectual interests still, in the instinct which leads
him to pity and water a thirsty plant, is struggling
away from that exclusive imprisonment in his own
interests and needs which is the Old Enemy of us

198 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

all. The fact that this altruistic interest is not an
overmastering passion which moves him to continuous
responsible care for the plant, and the other fact that,
even while he is giving it a drink, he has very likely
forgotten his original purpose in the fascinations of
the antics of water poured out of a sprinkling-pot,
should not in the least modify our recognition of the
sincerely moral character of his first impulse.

Now, sincerity in moral impulse is a prerequisite
to healthy moral life, the importance of which cannot
be overstated by the most swelling devices of rhetoric.
It is an essential in moral life as air is in physical
life ; in other words, moral life of any kind is entirely
impossible without it. Hypocrisy, conscious or un-
conscious, is a far worse enemy than ignorance,
since it poisons the very springs of spiritual life, and
yet few things are harder to avoid than unconscious
hypocrisy. A realization of this truth is perhaps
the explanation of a recent tendency in America
among fairly intelligent, fairly conscientious parents
utterly to despair of seeing any light on this problem,
and to attempt to solve it by running away from
it, to throw up the whole business in dismay at its
difficulty, to attempt no moral training at all, because
so much that is given is bad, and to " let the
children go, till they are old enough to choose for
themselves."

It is possible that this method, chosen in despera-
tion, bad though it obviously is, is better than the
older one of attempting to explain to little children

MORAL TRAINING 199

the mysteries of the ordering of the universe before
which our own mature ^spirits pause in bewildered
uncertainty. The children of six who conceive of
God as a policeman with a long white beard, oddly
enough placed in the sky, lying on the clouds, and
looking down through a peephole to spy upon the
actions of little girls and boys, have undoubtedly
been cruelly wronged by the creation of this
grotesque and ignoble figure in their little brains, a
figure which — so permanent are the impressions of
childhood — will undoubtedly, in years to come, uncon-
sciously render much more difficult a reverent and
spiritual attitude towards the Ultimate Cause. But
because this attempt at spiritual instruction is as
bad as it can be, it does not follow that the moral
nature of the little child does not need training fitted
to its capacities, limited though these undoubtedly
are in early childhood. There is no more reason for
leaving a child to grow up morally unaided by a life
definitely designed to develop his moral nature than
for leaving him to grow up physically unaided by
good food, to expect that he will select this instinc-
tively by his own unaided browsings in the pantry
among the different dishes prepared for the varying
needs of his elders.

The usual method by which bountiful Nature,
striving to make up for our deficiencies, provides for
this, is by the action of children upon each other.
This factor is, of course, notably present in the Casa
dei Bambini in the all-day life in common of twenty

200 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

children. In families it is especially to be seen in
the care and self-sacrifice which older children are
obliged to show towards younger ones. But in our
usual small prosperous American families, this
element of enforced moral effort is often wanting.
Either there are but one or two children, or, if more,
the younger ones are cared for by a nurse, or by the
mother sufficiently free from pressing material care to
give considerable time to the baby of the family.
And on the whole it must be admitted that Nature's
expedient is at best a rough-and-ready one. Though
the older children may miss an opportunity for
spiritual discipline, it is manifestly better for the baby
to be tended by an adult.

But there are other organisms besides babies which
are weaker than children, and the care for plants and
animals seems to be the natural door through which
the little child may first go forth to his lifelong battle
with his own egotism. It is always to be borne in
mind that the Case dei Bambini now actually existing
are by no means ideal embodiments of Dr. Montes-
sori's ideas (see page 228). She has not had a perfectly
free hand with any one of them, and herself says
constantly that many phases of her central principle
have never been developed in practice. Hence the
absence of any special morally educative element in
the present Casa dei Bambini does not in the least
indicate that Dr. Montessori has deliberately omitted
it, any more than the perhaps too dryly practical
character of life in the original Casa dei Bambini

MORAL TRAINING 201

means anything but that the principle was being
applied to very poor children who were in need, first
of all, of practical help. For instance, music and art
were left out of the life there, simply because, at that
time, there seemed no way of introducing them. It is
hard for us to realize that the whole movement is so
extremely recent that there has not been time to over-
come many merely material obstacles. In the same
way, although circumstances have prevented Dr.
Montessori from developing practically the Casa dei
Bambini as far in the direction of the care of plants
and animals as she would like, she is very strongly
in favour of making this an integral and important
part of the daily life of little children.

In this she is again, as in so many of the features
of her system, only using the weight of her scientific
reputation to force upon our serious and respectful
attention means of education for little children which
have all along lain close at hand, which have been
mentioned by other educators (Froebel, of course,
makes his elder boys undertake gardening), but of
which, as far as very young children go, our recogni-
tion has been fitful and imperfect. She is the modern
doctor who proclaims, with all the awe-compelling
paraphernalia of the pathological laboratory at back
of him, that it is not medicine but fresh air which is
the cure for tuberculosis. Most parents already make
some effort to provide pets (if they are not too much
trouble for the rest of the family), with a vague,
instinctive idea that they are somehow " good for

202 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

children," but with no conscious notion of how this
" good " is transferred or how to facilitate the process ;
and child-gardens are not only a feature of some
very advanced and modern schools and kindergartens,
but are provided once in a while by a family,
although nearly always, as in Froebel's system, for
older children. But as those institutions are now
conducted in the average family economy, the little
child gets about as casual and irregular an opportunity
to benefit by them as the consumptive of twenty years
ago by the occasional whiffs of fresh air which the
protecting care of his nurses could not prevent from
reaching him. The four-year-old, as he and his pets
are usually treated, does not feel real responsibility
for his kitten or his potted plant, and, missing that,
he misses most of the good he might extract from his
relations with his little sisters of the vegetable and
animal world.

Our part, therefore, in this connection, is to catch
up the hint which the great Italian teacher has let
fall and use our own Yankee ingenuity in developing
it, always bearing religiously in mind the fundamental
principle of self-education which must underlie any
attempt of ours to adapt her ideas to our conditions.
For, of course, there is nothing new in the idea ot
associating children with animals and plants — an
idea common to nearly all educators since the first
child played with a puppy. What is new is our
more conscious, sharpened, more definite idea,
awakened by Dr. Montessori's penetrating analysis,

MORAL TRAINING 203

of just how these natural elements of child-life can be
used to stimulate a righteous sense of responsibility.
Our tolerant indifference towards the children's dogs
and cats and guinea-pigs, our fatigued complaint that
it is more bother than it is worth to prepare and
oversee the handling of garden-plots for the four- and
five-year-olds, would be transformed into the most
genuine and ardent interest in these matters, if we
were penetrated with the realization that their
purposeful use is the key to open painlessly and
naturally to our children the great kingdom of self-
abnegation. There is not, as is apt to be the case
with dolls, a more or less acknowledged element of
artificiality, even though it be the sweet " pretend "
mother-love for a baby doll. The children who really
care for plants and animals are in a sane world of
reality, as much as we are in caring for children. Their
services are of real value to another real life. The
four-year-old youngster who rushes as soon as he is
awake to water a plant he had forgotten the day
before, is acting on as genuine and purifying an
impulse of remorse and desire to make amends as any
we feel for a duty neglected in adult life. The
motives which underlie that most valuable moral
asset, responsibility, have been awakened, exercised,
strengthened far more vitally than any number of
those Sunday morning " serious talks " in which we
may try fumblingly and futilely from the outside to
touch the child's barely nascent moral consciousness.
The puppy who sprawls destructively about the

204 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

house, and the cat who is always under our feet when
we are in a hurry, should command respectful treat-
ment from us, since they are rehearsing quaintly with
the child a first rough sketch of the drama of his
moral life. The more gentleness, thoughtfulness,
care, and forbearance the little child learns to show
to this creature, weaker than himself, dependent on
him, the less difficult he will find the exercise of those
virtues in other circumstances. He is forming spon-
taneously, urged thereto by a natural good impulse
of his heart, a moral habit as valuable to him and
to those who are to live with him, as the intellectual
habits of precision formed by the use of the geometric
insets.

Of course, he will in the first place form this habit
of unvarying gentleness towards plants and animals
only as he forms so many other habits, in simian
imitation of the actions of those about him. He must
absorb from example, as well as precept, the idea
that plants and animals, being dependent on us, have
a moral right to our unfailing care — a conception
which is otherwise not suggested to him until he is
several years older and has at back of him the habit of
several years of indifference toward this duty of the
strong.

And so here is our hard-working Montessori parent
embarked upon the career of animal-rearing, as well
as child-training, with the added difficulty that she
must care for the animals through the children, and
resist stoutly the almost invincible temptation to take

MORAL TRAINING 205

over this, like all other activities which belong by
right to the child, for the short-cut reason that it is
less trouble. If this impulse of the parent be fol-
lowed, the mere furry presence will be of no avail
to the child, except casually. The kitten must be the
little girl's kitten if she is really to begin the long
preparation which will lead her to the steady and
resolute self-abnegations of maternity, the prepara-
tion which we hope will make her generation better
mothers than we undisciplined and groping creatures
are.

As for plant-life, the Antaeus-like character of
humanity is too well known to need comment. We
are all healthier and saner and happier if we have not
entirely severed our connection with the earth, and it
is surprising that, recognizing this element as con-
sciously as we do, we have made comparatively little
systematic and regular use of it in the family to
benefit our little children. It is not because it is very
hard to manage. What has been lacking has been
some definite, understandable motive to make us act
in this way, beyond the sentimental notion that it
is pretty to have flowers and children together. No
one before has told us plainly arid analytically that
this observation and care of plants and imaginative
sympathy with their needs is the easiest and most
natural way for little minds to get a first general
notion of the world's economy, the struggle between
helpful and hurtful forces, and of the duty of not
remaining a passive onlooker at this strife, but of

206 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

entering it instinctively, heartily throwing all one's
powers on the side of the good and useful.

I know a child not yet quite three, who, by the
maddeningly persistent interrogations characteristic
of his age, has succeeded in extracting from a pair
of gardening elders an explanation of the difference
between weeds and flowers, and who has been so struck
by this information that he has, entirely of his own
volition, enlisted himself in the army of natural-born
reformers. With the personal note of very little chil-
dren, who find it so impossible to think in terms at
all abstract, he has constructed in his baby mind an
exciting drama in the garden, unfolding itself before
his eyes, a drama in which he acts, by virtue of his
comparatively huge size and giant strength, the
generous role of deus ex machina, constantly rescuing
beauty beset by her foes. He throws himself upon
a weed, uproots it, and casts it away, with the
righteously indignant exclamation : " Horrid old
weed ! Stop eating the flowers' dinner ! "

I do not think that it can be truthfully said that
there are no moral elements in his life. He is a baby
Sir Galahad, with roses for his maidens in distress.
He has felt and exercised and strengthened the same
impulse that drove Judge Lindsay to his battle for
the children of Denver against the powers of graft
He has recognized spontaneously his duty to aid the
good and useful against their enemies, the responsi-
bility into which he was born when he opened his
eyes upon the world of mingled good and evil.

MORAL TRAINING 207

All this is not a fanciful literary flight of the imagi-
nation. It is not sentimentality. It is calling things
by their real names. The fact that the little child's
capacity for a genuine moral impulse is small, and
has, like all his other capacities, little continuity, is no
reason why we should not think clearly about it and
recognize it for what it is — the key to the future.
If he "makes a play" of his good action and is not
priggishly aware of his virtue we have all the more
reason to be thankful, for that is a proof of its
unforced existence in his spirit. Just as the child
"makes a play" out of his geometric insets, and is
not pedantically aware that he is acquiring know-
ledge, so, to take an instance from the Casa dei
Bambini, the little girls who set the tables and bring
in the soup are only vastly interested in the fun of
" playing waitress." It is their elders who perceive
that they are unconsciously and painlessly acquiring
the habit of willing and instinctive service to others,
which will aid them in many a future conscious and
painful struggle against their own natural selfishness
and inertia.

This use of the sincerely common life in the
Children's Home to promote sincerely social feeling
among the children has been mentioned in the
preceding chapter. It is one of the most vitally
important of the elements in the Montessori schools.
The genuine, unforced acceptance by the children
of the need for sacrifices by the individual for the
good of all is something which can only be brought

208 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

about by genuinely social life with their equals, such
as they have in the Children's Home and not else-
where. We must do the best we can in the family
life by seeing that the child shares as much as
possible and as sincerely as possible in the life of
the household. But at home he is inevitably living
with his inferiors — plants, animals, and babies ; or
his superiors — older children and adults ; whereas in
the Children's Home he is living, as he will during
the rest of his life, mostly with his equals. And it
is in the spontaneous adjustments and compromises
of this continuous life with his equals that he learns
most naturally, most soundly, and most thoroughly
the rules governing social life.

As for moral life, it seems to me that we need
neither make a vain attempt to subscribe to a too
rosy belief in the unmixed goodness of human nature,
and blind ourselves to the saddening fact that the
battle against one's egotism is bound to be painful,
nor, on the other hand, go back to the grim creed
of our forefathers, that the sooner children are thrust
into the thick of this unending war the better,
since they must enter it sooner or later. The
truth seems to lie in its usual position, between
two extremes, and to be that children should be
strengthened by proper moral food, care, and exer-
cises suited to their strength, and allowed to grow
slowly into adult endurance before they are forced
to face adult moral problems, and that we may
protect them from too great demands on their small

MORAL TRAINING 209

fund of capacity for self-sacrifice by allowing them
and even encouraging them to wreathe their imagin-
ative " plays " about the self-sacrificing action,
provided, of course, that we keep our heads clear
to make sure that the "plays" do not interfere with
the action.

It is well to make a plain statement to the child
of five, that he is requested to wipe the silver-ware
because it will be of service to his mother (if he is
lucky enough to have a mother who ever does so
obviously necessary and useful a thing as to wash
the dishes herself), but it is not necessary to insist
that this conception of service shall uncompromisingly
occupy his mind during the whole process. It does
no harm if, after this statement, it is suggested that
the knives and forks and spoons are shipwrecked
people in dire need of rescue, and that it would be
fun to snatch them from their watery predicament
and restore them safely to their expectant families
in the silver-drawer. By so doing we are not really
confusing the issue, or " fooling " the child into a
good action, if clear thinking on the part of adults
accompany the process. We are but suiting the
burden to the childish shoulders, but inducing the
child-feet to take a single step, which is all that any
of us can take at one time, in the path leading to the
service of others.

Most of this chapter has been drawn from Montes-
sori ideas by inference only, by the development

210 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

of hints, and it is probable that other mothers,
meditating on the same problems, may see other
ways of applying the principle of self-education and
spontaneous activity to this field of moral life. It is
apparent that the first element necessary, after a
firm grasp on the fundamental idea that our children
must do their own moral as well as physical growing,
and after a vivid realization that the smallest amount
of real moral life is better than much simulated
and unreal feeling, is clear thinking on our part, a
definite notion of what we really mean by moral life,
a definition which will not be bounded and limited
by the repetition of committed-to-memory prayers.
This does not mean that simply nightly aspirations
to be a good child the next day may not have a
most beneficial effect on even a very young child
and may satisfy the first stirrings to life of the
religious instinct as much as the constant daily
kindnesses to plants and animals satisfy the ethical
instinct. This latter, however, at his age, is apt to
be vastly more developed and more important than
the religious instinct.

Indeed the religious instinct, which apparently
never develops in some natures, although so strong
in others, is in all cases slow to show itself, and,
like other slowly germinating seeds, should not be
pushed and prodded to hasten it, but should be left
untouched until it shows signs of life. Our part is
to prepare, cultivate, and enrich the nature in which
it is to grow.

CHAPTER XV

DR. MONTESSORI'S LIFE AND THE ORIGIN OF THE
CASA DEI BAMBINI

DR. MONTESSORI and the average American
parent are as different in heredity, training, and en-
vironment as two civilized beings can very well be.
Every condition surrounding the average American
child is as materially different as possible from those
about the children in the original Casa dei Bambini.
Hence the usual sound rule that the individuality
and personal history of the scientist do not concern
the student of his work does not hold in this case.
The conditions in Rome, where Dr. Montessori has
done her work, differ so entirely from those of
ordinary American life, in the conduct of which we
hope to profit by her experiments, that it is only
fair to Americans interested in her work to give
them some notion of the varying influences which
have shaped the career of this woman of genius.

This is so especially in her case, because, as a nation,
we are more ignorant of modern Italian life than of
that of any great European nation. Modern Italy,
wrestling with all the problems of modern industrial
and city life, grafted upon an age-old civilization,

212 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

endeavouring to enlighten itself, to take the best
from twentieth-century progress without losing its
own individual virtues, this is a country as unknown
to us as the regions of the moon. And yet, to under-
stand Dr. Montessori's work and the vicissitudes of
her undertakings, we must have at least a summary
knowledge that the Italian world of to-day is in a
curious ferment of antiquated prejudices and highly
progressive thought.

To us, as a rule, Rome is " The Eternal City " of
our school-Latin days, whereas, in reality, it is, for
all practical purposes as a city, much more recent
than New York — about as old, let us say, as Detroit.
But Detroit planted its vigorously-growing seedling
in the open ground and not in a cracked pot of small
dimensions. Hence the problems of the two modern
cities are dissimilar. I heard it suggested by a
man of authority in the Italian Government that
a great mistake had been made when the modern
capital of Italy had been dumped down upon the
heap of historic ruins which remained of ancient
Rome. It had been bad for the ruins and very hard
on the modern capital. If a site had been selected
just outside the walls of old Rome, a nineteenth-
century metropolis could have sprung up with the
effortless haste with which our own Middle Western
plains have produced cities. One thing is certain,
Dr. Montessori's Case dei Bambini would not have
taken their present form under other conditions, and
this is what concerns us here.

DR. MONTESSORI'S LIFE 213

But before the origin of the Case dei Bambini is
taken up, a brief biography of their creator will
help us to understand her development. Her early life,
before her choice of a profession, need not interest
us /beyond the fact that sjie__is the only child, of
devoted parents, not materially well-to-do. Now, as
a result of a too-rapid social transformation among
the Italians, the " middle-class " population forms a
much smaller proportion of the inhabitants of Italy
than in other modern nations. One result of this
condition is that the brilliant daughter of parents
not well-to-do finds it much harder to pass into a
class of associates and to find an intellectual back-
ground which suits her nature, than a similarly
intellectual and original American girl. Even now
in Italy such a girl is forced to fight an unceasing
battle against social prejudice and intellectual inertia.
It can be imagined that when Dr. Montessori was the
beautiful, gifted girl-student of whom older Romans
speak with enthusiasm or horror, according to the
centuries in which they morally live, her, will-power
and capacity for concentration must have been finely
tempered in order not to break in the long struggle.

Judging by the talk one hears in Rome about
the fine, youthful fervour of Dr. Montessori's early
struggle against conditions hampering her mental
and spiritual progress, she is a surviving pioneer of
social frontier prejudice, who has emerged from the
battle with pioneer conditions endowed with the
hickory-like toughness of intellectual fibre of will

214 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

/"V//^ and of character which is the reward of all sturdy
pioneers. Certain it is that her battles with pre-
judices of all sorts have hardened her intellectual
muscles and trained her mental eye in the school
of absolute moral self-dependence, that moral self-
dependence which is the aim and end of her method
of education and which will be, as rapidly as it
can be realized, the solvent for many of our tragic
and apparently insoluble modern problems.

It is hard for an American of this date to realize
the bombshell it must have been to an Italian family
a generation ago when its only daughter decided
to study medicine. So rapidly have conditions sur-
rounding women changed that there is no parallel
possible to be made which could bring home to us
fully the tremendous will-power necessary for an
Italian woman of that time and class to stick to her
resolution. The fangs of that particular prejudice .
have been so well-nigh universally drawn that it is
safe to say that an American family would see its
only daughter embark on the career of animal-tamer,
steeplejack, or worker in an iron foundry with less
trepidation than must have shadowed the early days
of Dr. Montessori's medical studies. One's imagina-
tion can paint the picture from the fact that she was
the first woman to obtain the degree of Doctor of
Medicine from the University of Rome, an achieve-
ment which was probably rendered none the easier
by the fact that she was both singularly beautiful and
singularly ardent

DR. MONTESSORI'S LIFE 215

After graduation she became attached, as assistant
doctor, to the Psychiatric Clinic at Rome. At that
time, one of the temporary expedients of self-
modernizing Italy was to treat the idiot and feeble-
minded children in connection with the really insane,
a rough-and-ready classification which will serve
vividly to illustrate the desperate condition of Italy
at that date. The young medical graduate had taken
up children's diseases as the "specialty" which no
self-respecting modern doctor can be without, and
naturally, in her visits to the insane asylums (where
the subjects of her Clinic lived), her attention was
attracted to the deficient children so fortuitously
lodged under the same roof.

I go into the details of the oblique manner in
which she embarked upon the prodigious undertaking
of education without any conscious knowledge of the
port toward which she was directing her course, in
order to bring out clearly the fact that she approached
the field of pedagogy from an entirely new direction,
with absolutely new aims and with a wholly different
mental equipment from those of the technically
pedagogic, philosophic, or social-reforming persons
who have laboured conscientiously in that field for
many generations.

^This young doctor, then, trained by hard knocks to
do her own thinking and make her own decisions,
found that her absorbed study of abnormal and
deficient children led her straight along the path
taken by the nerves from their unregulated external

216 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

activities to the brain-centres which rule them so
fitfully. The question was evidently one of getting at
the brain-centres. Now, the name of the process of
getting at brain-centres is one not usually encoun-
tered in the life of the surgeon. It is education.

The doctor at work on these problems was all the
time in active practice as a physician, an influence
in her life which is not to be forgotten in summing up
the elements which have formed her character. She
was performing operations in the hospitals, taking
charge of grave diseases in her private practice,
exposing herself to infection of all sorts in the
infectious wards of the hospitals, liable to be called
up at any hour of the night to attend a case any-
where in the purlieus of Rome. It was a soldier tried
and tested in actual warfare in another part of the
battle for the betterment of humanity who finally
took up the question of the training of the young.
She parted company with many of her fellow-students
of deficient children, and faced squarely the results
of her reasoning. Not for her the position aloof, the
observation of phenomena from the detached stand-
point of the distant specialist. If nervous diseases
of children, leading to deficient intellectual powers,
could be best attacked through education, the obvious
step was to become an educator.

She gave up her active practice as a physician,
which had continued steadily throughout all her other
activities, and accepted the post of Director of the
State Orthophrenic School (what we should call an

DR. MONTESSORI'S LIFE 217

Institute for the Feeble-Minded), and, throwing her-
self into the work, heart and soul, with all the ardour
of her race and her own temperament, she utilized
her finely-tempered brain and indomitable will, in
the hand-to-hand struggle for the actual ameliora-
tion of existing conditions. For years she taught the
children in the Asylum under her care, devoting her-
self to them throughout every one of their waking
hours, pouring into the poor, cracked vases of their
minds the full, rich flood of her own powerful in-
tellect. All day she worked with her children, loved
to idolatry by them, exhausting herself over their
problems like the simplest, most unthinking, most
unworldly, and devout sister of charity ; but at night
she was the scientist again, arranging, classifying,
clarifying the results of the day's observations, ex-
amining with minute attention the work of all those
who had studied her problems before her, applying
and elaborating every hint of theirs, every clue
discovered in her own experiments.

Those were good years, years before the world
had heard of her, years of undisturbed absorption
in her work.

Then, one day, as such things come, after long
uncertain efforts, a miracle happened. A sup-
posedly deficient child, trained by her methods,
passed the examinations of a public school with
more ease, with higher marks, than normal children
prepared in the old way. The miracle happened
again and again, and then so often that it was no

218 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

longer a miracle, but a fact to be foretold and counted
on with certainty.

Then the woman with the eager heart and trained
mind drew a long breath, and, determining to make
this first success only the cornerstone of a new
temple, turned to a larger field of action, the field to
which her every unconscious step had be^n leading
her, the education, no longer only of the deficient,
but of all the normal young of the human race.

It was in 1900 that Dr. Montessori left the Scuola
Ortofrenica, and began to prepare herself consciously
and definitely for the task before her. For seven
years she followed a course of self-imposed study,
meditation, observation, and intense thought. She
began by registering as a student of philosophy in
the University of Rome and turned her attention to
experimental psychology with especial reference to
child-psychology. The habit of her scientific training
disposed her naturally, as an accompaniment to her
own research, to examine thoroughly the existing
and recognized authorities in her new field. She
began to visit the primary schools and to look about
her at the orthodox and old-established institutions
of the educational world with the fresh vision only
possible to a mind trained by scientific research to
abhor preconceived ideas and to come to a conclusion
only after weighing actual evidence.

No more diverting picture can be imagined than
the one presented by this keen-eyed, clear-headed
scientist surveying, with an astonishment which must

DR. MONTESSORI'S LIFE 219

have been almost dramatically apparent, the rows
of immobile little children nailed to their stationary
seats and forced to give over their natural birth-
right of activity to a well-meaning, gesticulating,
explaining, always-fatigued, and always-talking
teacher. It was evident at a glance that she could
not find there what she had hoped to find, that first
prerequisite of the modern scientist, a prolonged
scrutiny of the natural habits of the subject of in-
vestigation. The entomologist seeking to solve some
of the farmer's problems spends years with a micro-
scope, studying the habits of the potato and of the
potato-bug before he tries to invent a way to help
the one and circumvent the other. But Dr. Mon-
tessori found, so to speak, that all the potatoes she
tried to investigate were being grown in a cellar.
They grew, somehow, because the upward thrust
of life is invincible, but their pale shoots gave no
evidence of the possibility of the sturdy stems, which
a chance specimen or two escaped by a stroke of
luck from the cellar proved to be possible for the
whole species.

At the same time that she was making these
amazed and disconcerted visits to the primary
schools she was devouring all the books which have
been written on her subject. My own acquaintance
with works on pedagogy is limited, but I observe
that people who do know them do not seem surprised
that this thoroughly trained modern doctor, with
years of practical teaching at back of her, should

220 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

have found little aid in them. Two highly valuable
authorities she did find, significantly enough doctors
like herself, one who lived at the time of the French
Revolution and one perhaps fifty years later. She
tells us in her book what their ideas were and how
strongly they modified her own ; but as we are here
chiefly concerned with the net result of her thought,
it would not be profitable to go exhaustively into
the investigation of her sources. It is enough to
say that most of us would never in our lives have
heard of those two doctors if she had not studied
them.

We have now followed the course of Dr. Montes-
sori's life until it brings us back to that chaotic,
ancient-modern Rome mentioned a few paragraphs
above, struggling with all sorts of modern problems
of city life. The housing of the very poor is a
question troublesome enough, even to Detroit or
Indianapolis, with their bright, new municipal
machinery. In Rome the problem is complicated by
the mediaeval standards of the poor themselves as to
their own comfort, by the existence of many old
rookeries where they may roost in unspeakable con-
ditions of filth and promiscuity, and by the lack of
a widespread popular enlightenment as to the pro-
gress of the best modern communities. But, though
Italian public opinion as a whole seems to be in a
somewhat dazed condition over the velocity of
changes in the social structure, there is no country
in the world which has more acute, powerful, or

DR. MONTESSORI'S LIFE 221

original intelligences and consciences trained on our
modern problems. All the while that Dr. Montessori
had been trying to understand the discrepancy be-
tween the rapid advance of idiot children under her
system and the slow advance of normal children
under old-fashioned methods, another Italian, an
influential, intelligent, and patriotic Roman, Signer
Edoardo Talamo, was studying the problem of
bettering at once practically the housing of the
very poor.

He had decided what to do and had done it, when
the line of his activity and that of Dr. Montessori's
met in one of those apparently fortuitous combina-
tions of elements destined to form a compound which
is exactly the medicine needed for some unhealthy
part of the social tissue. The plan of Signer Tala-
mo's model tenements was so wise and so admirably
executed that, except for one factor, they really
deserved their name. This factor was the existence
of a large number of little children under the usual
school age who were left alone all day while their
mothers, driven by the grinding necessity which is
the rule in the Italian lower working classes, went
out to help earn the family living. These little ones
wandered about the clean halls and stairways,
defacing everything they could reach and constantly
getting into mischief, the desolating ingenuity of
which can be imagined by any mother of small
children. It was evident that the money taken to
repair the damage done by them would be better

222 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

employed in preventing them from doing it in the
first place. Signor Talamo conceived the simple
plan of setting apart a big room in every one of his
tenement houses where the children could be kept
together. This, of course, meant that some grown
person must be there to look after them.

Now, Rome is, at least from the standpoint of a
New Yorker or a Chicagoan, a small city, where
" everyone who is anyone knows everyone else."
Although the sphere of Signor Talamo's activity was
as far as possible from that of the pioneer woman
doctor specializing in children's brain-centres, he
knew of her existence, and naturally enough asked
her to undertake the organization and the manage-
ment of the different groups of children in his tene-
ment houses, collected, as far as he was concerned,
for the purpose of keeping them from scratching
the walls and fouling the stairways.

On her part, Dr. Montessori took a rapid mental
survey of these numerous groups of normal children
at exactly the age when she thought them most
susceptible to the right sort of education, and saw
in them, as if sent by a merciful Providence, the
experimental laboratories which she so much needed
to carry on her work, and which she had definitely
found that primary schools could never become.

The fusion of two elements which are destined to
combine is not a long process once they are brought
together. How completely Dr. Montessori was pre-
pared for the opportunity thus given her can be

DR. MONTESSORTS LIFE 223

calculated by the fact that the first Casa dei Bambini
was opened on January 6; iqp7r .and that now, only
five years after, from every quarter of the globe there
arrive in Rome bewildered but imperious demands
for enlightenment on the new idea.

For it was at once apparent that the fundamental
principle of self-education, which had been growing
larger and larger in Dr. Montessori's mind, was as
brilliantly successful in actual practice as it was plausi-
ble in abstract thought. Evidently entire freedom
for the children was not only better for the purposes
of the scientific investigator, but infinitely the best
thing for the children. All those meditations about
the real nature of childhood, over which she had been
brooding in the long years of her study, proved
themselves, once put to the test, as axiomatic in
reality as they had seemed. Her theories held water.
The children justified all her visions of their capacity
for perfectibility, and very soon went far beyond
anything even she had conceived of their ability to
teach and to govern themselves. For instance, she
had not the least idea when she began of teaching
children under six how to write. She held, as most
other educators did, that on the whole it was too
difficult an undertaking for such little ones. It was
her own peculiar characteristic, or rather the char-
acteristic of her scientific training, of extreme open-
ness to conviction, which induced her, after practical
experience, to begin her famous experiments with
the method for writing.

224 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

The story of this startling revelation of unsus-
pected forces in human youth and of the almost
instant pounce upon it by the world, distracted by
a helpless sense of the futility and clumsiness of
present methods of education, is too well-known to
need a long recapitulation. The first Casa dei
Bambini was established in January, 1907, without
attracting the least attention from the public. About
a year after, another was opened. This time,
owing to the marked success of the first, the affair
was more of a ceremony, and Dr. Montessori
delivered there that eloquent inaugural address which
is reprinted in the English translation of her book.
By April of 1908, only a little over a year after the
first small beginning, the institution of the Casa
dei Bambini was discovered by the public, keen on
the scent of anything that promised relief from
the almost intolerable lack of harmony between
modern education and modern needs. Pilgrims of
all nationalities and classes found their way through
the filthy streets of that wretched quarter, and the
barely established institution, still incomplete in many
ways, with many details untouched, with many others
provided for only in a makeshift manner, was set
under the microscopic scrutiny of innumerable sharp
eyes.

The result, as far as we are concerned, we all
know — the rumours, vague at first, which blew across
our lives, then more definite talk of something really
new, then the characteristically American promptness

DR. MONTESSORI'S LIFE 225

of response in our magazines, and the almost equally
prompt appearance of an English translation of
Dr. Montessori's book.

And, so far, that is all we have from her, and
for the present it is all we can have, without taking
some action ourselves to help her. It is a strange
situation, intensely modern, which could only have
occurred in this age of instantly tattling cables
and telegrams. It is, of course, a great exaggera-
tion to say that all educated parents and teachers
in America are interested in the Montessori system,
but the proportion who really seem to be is astonish-
ing in the extreme when one considers the very
recent date of the beginning of the whole movement.
Over there in Rome, in a tenement house, a woman
doctor begins observations in an experimental
laboratory of children ; and in five years' time, which
is nothing to a real scientist, her laboratory doors
are stormed by inquirers from Australia, from
Norway, from Mexico, and, most of all, from the
United States. Teachers of district schools in the
Carolinas write to their cousins touring in Europe to
be sure to go to Rome to see the Montessori schools.
Mothers from Oregon and Maine write, addressing
their letters, " Montessori, Rome," and make demands
for enlightenment, urgent, pressing, peremptory, and
blamelessly peremptory ; since they conceive of a
possibility that their children, their own children, the
most important human beings in the world, may
be missing something valuable. From innumerable
15

226 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

towns and cities, teachers, ambitious to be in the
front of their profession, are taking their hoarded
savings from the bank, and starting to Rome with the
naYve conviction that their own thirst for information
is sufficient guarantee that someone will instantly be
forthcoming to provide it for them.

When they reach Rome, most of them quite unable
to express themselves in Italian or even in French,
what do they find, all these tourists and letters of
inquiry and adventuring schoolmistresses ? They
find a dead wall. They have an unformulated idea
that they are probably going to a highly organized
institution of some sort, like our huge " model
schools" attached to our normal colleges, through
the classrooms of which an unending file of observers
is allowed to pass. And they have no idea whatever
of the inevitability with which Italians speak Italian.

They find — if they are relentlessly persistent enough
to pierce through the protection her friends try to
throw about her — only Dr. Montessori herself, a
private individual phenomenally busy with very im-
portant work, who does not speak or understand a
word of English, who has neither money, time, nor
strength enough singlehanded to cope with the flood
of inquiries and inquirers about her ideas. In order
to devote herself entirely to the great undertaking
of transmitting her divinations of the truth into a
definite, logical, and scientific system, she has with-
drawn herself more and more from public life. She
has resigned her chair of anthropology in the Uni-

DR. MONTESSORI'S LIFE 227

versity of Rome, and last year sent a substitute to
do her work in another academic position not con-
nected with her present research — and this although
she is far from being a woman of independent means.
She has sacrificed everything in her private life, in
order to have, for the development of her educational
ideas, that time and freedom so constantly infringed
upon by the well-meaning urgency of our demands
for instruction from her.

She lives now in the most intense retirement, never
taking a vacation from her passionate absorption
in her work, not even giving herself time for the
exercise necessary for health, surrounded and aided
by a little group of five devoted disciples, young
Italian women who live with her, who call her
"mother," and who exist in and for her and her
ideas as ardently and wholeheartedly as nuns about
an adored Mother Superior. Together they are
giving up their lives to the development of a com-
plete educational system based on the fundamental
idea of self-education which gave such brilliant results
in the Casa dei Bambini with children from three to
six. For the past year, helped spiritually by these
disciples and materially by influential Italian friends,
Dr. Montessori has been experimenting with the
application of her ideas to children from six to nine,
and I think it is no violation of her confidence to
report that these experiments have been as astonish-
ingly successful as her work with younger children.

It is to this woman, burning with eagerness to do

228 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

her work, absorbed in the exhausting problems of
intellectual creation, that students from all over the
world are turning for instruction in a phase of her
achievement which now lies behind her. The woman
in the genius is touched and. heartened by the sudden
homage of the world, but it is the spirit of the in-
vestigating scientist which most often inhabits that
powerful, bulky, yet lightly poised body, and looks
out from those dark, prophetic eyes ; and from the
point of view of the scientist the world asks too
much when it demands from her that she give herself
up to normal teaching. For it must be apparent
from the sketch of her present position that she
would need to give up her very life were she to
accede to all the requests for training teachers in
her primary method, since she is simply a private
individual, has no connection with the official edu-
cational system of her country, is at the head of no
normal school, gives no courses of lectures, and has
no model schools of her own to which to invite
visitors. It is hard to believe her sad yet unembittered
statement that there is now in Rome not one primary
school which is entirely under her care, which she
authorizes in all its detail, which is really a " Mon-
tessori School." There are, it is true, some which
she started and which are still conducted according
to her ideas in the majority of details, but not one
where she is the leading spirit.

There are a variety of reasons, natural enough
when one has once taken in the situation, which

DR. MONTESSORI'S LIFE 229

account for this state of things, so bewildering and
disconcerting to those who have come from so far
to learn at headquarters about the new ideas. The
Italian Government, straining to carry the heavy
burdens of a modern State, feels itself unable to
undertake a radical and necessarily very costly re-
organization of its schools, the teachers very naturally
fear revolutionary changes which would render use-
less their hard-won diplomas, and carry on a secret
campaign against the new system, which has been
so far successful. Hence it happens that investiga-
tors coming from across seas have the not unfamiliar
experience of finding the prophet by no means head
of the official religion of his own country.

In the other camp, fighting just as bitterly, are
the Montessori adherents, full of enthusiasm for her
philosophy, devoting all the forces at their command
(and they include many of the highest intellectual and
social forces) to the success of the cause which they
believe to be of the utmost importance to the future
of the race. It can be seen that the situation is not
orderly, calm, or in any way adapted to dispassionate
investigation.

And yet people who have come from California
and British Columbia and Buenos Ayres to seek for
information naturally do not wish to go back to their
distant homes without making a violent effort to
investigate. What they usually try to do is to force
from someone in authority a card of admission either
to the Montessori school held in the Franciscan

280 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

nunnery on the Via Giusti, or to another conducted
by Signora Galli among the children of an extremely
poor quarter of Rome, or, innocent and unaware,
in all good faith go to visit the institutions in the
model tenements, still called Case dei Bambini. But
Dr. Montessori's relations with those schools ceased
in 1911 as a result of an unfortunate disagreement
v between Signer Talamo and herself, in which, so far
as an outsider can judge, she was not to blame, and
those infant schools are now thought by impartial
judges to be far from good expositions of her
methods, and in many cases are actual travesties of
it. Furthermore, Dr. Montessori has now no con-
nection with Signora Galli's schools. This leaves
accessible to her care and guided by her counsels
only the school held in the Franciscan nunnery
which is directed by Signorina Ballerini, one of Dr.
Montessori's own disciples, as the nearest approach
to a school under her own control in Rome. This is,
in many ways, an admirable example of the wonder-
ful result of the Montessori ideas, and is a revelation
to all who visit it. But even here, though the good
nuns make every effort to give a free hand to
Signorina Ballerini, it can be imagined that the
ecclesiastical atmosphere, which in its very essence is
composed of unquestioning obedience to authority,
is not the most congenial one for the growth of a
system which uses every means possible to do away
with dogma of any sort, and to foster self-dependence
and first-hand ideas of things. More than this, if

DR. MONTESSORI'S LIFE 231

^
this school admitted freely all those who wish to visit

it, there would be more visitors than children on
many a day.

It is not hard to sympathize with the searchers
for information who come from the ends of the earth,
who stand aghast at this futile ending of their long
journey. And yet it would be the height of folly
for the world to call away from her all-important
work an investigator from whom we hope so much
in the future. How can we expect her, against all
manner of material odds, to organize a normal
school in a country with a Government indifferent,
if not hostile, to her ideas, to gather funds, to rent
rooms, to arrange hours, hire janitors, and arrange
courses !

But the proselytizer who lives in every ardent
believer makes her as unreconciled to the state of
things as we are. She is regretfully aware of the
opportunity to spread the new gospel which is being
lost with every day of silence, distressed at the
thought of sending the pilgrims away empty-handed,
and above all naturally distracted with anxiety lest
impure, misunderstanding caricatures of her system
spread abroad in the world as the only answer to the
demand for information about it. Busy as she is
with the most absorbing investigations, Dr. Montes-
sori is willing to meet the world halfway. If those
who ask her to teach them will do the tangible,
comparatively simple work of establishing an Institute
of Experimental Pedagogy in Rome, the Dottoressa,

\ u

gi

282 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

for all her concentration on her further research, will
be more than willing to give enough of her time
to make the school as wonderful, beautiful, and
inspiring as only a Montessori school can be.

Our part should be to endeavour to learn from
her what we can, without disturbing too much that
freedom of life which is as essential to her as to
the children in her schools, to give generously to an
Institute of Experimental Pedagogy, and then freely
allow her own inspiration to shape its course. Surely
the terms are not hard ones, and it is to be hoped
that the United States, with the genuine, if somewhat
haphazard, willingness to further the cause of educa-
tion, which is perhaps our most creditable national
characteristic, will accept the offered opportunity
and divert a little of the money now being spent in
America on scientific investigation of every sort to
this investigation so vital for the coming generation.
The need is urgent, the sum required is not large,
the opportunity is one in a century, and the end to
be gained valuable beyond the possibility of exag-
geration, for, as Dr. Montessori quotes at the end of
the preface of her book, " Whoso strives for the re-
eneration of education strives for the regeneration
of the human race."

CHAPTER XVI

SOME LAST REMARKS

THAT there is little prospect of an immediate
adoption in the United States of Montessori ideas
of flexibility and unhampered individual growth is
apparent to anyone who knows even slightly the
hierarchic rigidity of our system of education, with
its inexorable advance along fixed, foreordained
lines, from the kindergarten through the primary
school, on through the high-school, to the Chinese
ordeal of the college entrance examination, an event
which casts its shadow far down the line of school-
grades, embittering the intellectual activities and
darkening the life of teachers and pupils (even pupils
who have not the faintest chance of going to college)
for years before the awful moment arrives.

All really good teachers have always been, as much
as they were allowed to be, some variety of what is
called in this book " Montessori teacher." But as the
State and private systems of education have swollen
to more and more unmanageable proportions, and
have settled into more and more exact and cog-like
relations with each other, teachers have found them-

233

284 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

selves required to "turn out a more uniform pro-
duct," a process which is in its very essence utterly
abhorrent to anyone with the soul of an educator.

Our State system of education has come to such
an exalted degree of uniformity that a child in a
third grade in Southern California can be trans-
ported to a third grade in Maine, and find himself
in company with children being ground out in pre-
cisely the same educational hopper he has left. His
temperament, capacity, tastes, surroundings, probable
future, and aspirations may be what you will, he will
find all the children about his age of all tempera-
ments, tastes, capacities, probable futures and aspira-
tions, practically everywhere in the United States,
being " educated " exactly as he was in his original
graded school, wherever it was. School superinten-
dents hold conferences of self-congratulation over
this "standardizing" of American education, and
some teachers are so hypnotized by this mental
attitude on the part of their official superiors, that
they come to take a pride in the Procrustean
quality of their schoolroom, where all statures are
equalized, and to labour conscientiously to drive
thirty or more children slowly and steadily, like a
flock of little sheep, with no stragglers and no ad-
vance-guard allowed, along the straight road to the
next division, where another shepherdess, with the
same training, takes them in hand. There is a
significant anecdote current in school-circles, of an
educator rising to address an educational convention

SOME LAST REMARKS 235

which had been discussing special treatment for
mentally slow and deficient children, and solemnly
making only this pregnant exclamation, " We have
special systems for the deficient child and the slow
child and the stupid child . . . but God kelp the
bright child!"

Now it is only fair to state that this mechanical
exactitude of programme and of organization has been
in the past of incalculable service in bringing educa-
tional order out of the chaos which was the inevitable
result of the astoundingly rapid growth in popula-
tion of our country. Our educational system is a
monument to the energy, perseverance, and organiz-
ing genius of the various educational authorities,
city, county, and State superintendents, and so on,
who have created it. But, like all other complicated
machines, it needs to be controlled by master-minds
who do not forget its ultimate purpose in the fascina-
tion of its smoothly-running wheels. That there is
plenty of the right spirit fermenting among educators
is evident. For, even along with the mighty develop-
ment of this educational machine, has gone a steadily-
increasing protest on the part of the best teachers and
superintendents against its quite possible misuse.

Few people become teachers for the sake of the
money to be made in that business ; it is a profession
which rapidly becomes almost intolerable to anyone
who has not a natural taste for it ; and, as a con-
sequence of these two factors, it is perhaps, of all the
professions, the one which has the largest propor-

286 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

tion of members with a natural aptitude for their
lifework. With the instinctive right-feeling of human
beings engaged in the work for which they were
born, a considerable proportion of teachers have
protested against the tacit demand upon them by
the machine organization of education to make the
children under their care all alike. They have felt
keenly the essential necessity of inculcating initiative
and self-dependence in their pupils, and in many
cases have been aided and abetted in these heterodox
ideas by more or less sympathetic principals and
superintendents ; but the ugly, hard fact remains,
not a whit diminished for all their efforts, that the
teacher whose children are not able to " pass " given
examinations on given subjects, at the end of a given
time, is under suspicion ; and the principal whose
school is full of such teachers is very apt to give way
to a successor chosen by a board of business men
with a cult for efficiency. To advise teachers under
such conditions to "adopt Montessori ideas" is to
add the grimmest mockery to the difficulties of their
position. All that can be hoped for, at present, in
that direction is, that the strong emphasis placed
by the Montessori method on the necessity for indi-
vidual freedom of mental activity and growth may
prove a valuable reinforcement to those American
educators who are already struggling along towards
that goal.

This general state of things in the formal educa-
tion of our country is one of the many reasons why

SOME LAST REMARKS 237

this book is addressed to mothers and not to teachers.
The natural development of Montessori ideas, the
natural results of the introduction of " Children's
Homes " into the United States, without this already
existing fixed educational organization convinced of
its own perfection, would be entirely in accord with
the general, vague, unconscious socialistic drift of
our time. Little by little various enterprises which
used to be private and individual are being carried
on by some central, expert organization. This is
especially true as regards the life of women. One
by one, all the old " home industries " are being taken
away from us. Our laundry-work, bread-making,
sewing, house-furnishing, and the like, are all done
in impersonal industrial centres far from the home.
The education of children over six has already fol-
lowed this general direction and is less and less in
the hands of the children's mothers. And now here
is the Casa dei Bambini, ready to take the younger
children out of our yearning arms, and sternly for-
bidding us to protest, as our mothers were forbidden
to protest when we, as girls, went away to college, or
when trained nurses came in to take the care of
their sick children away from them, because the
best interests of the coming generation demand this
sacrifice.

But, as things stand now, we mothers have a little
breathing-space in which to accustom ourselves
gradually to this inevitable change in our world. At
some time in the future, society will certainly recog-

238 A MONTESSORI MOTHER

nize this close harmony of the successful Casa dei
Bambini with the rest of the tendencies of our times,
and then there will be a need to address a detailed
technical book on Montessori ideas to teachers, for
the training of little children will be in their hands, as
is already the training of older children.

And then will be completed the process which has
been going on so long of forcing all women into
labour suitable to their varying temperaments. The
last one of the so-called " natural," " domestic " occu-
pations will be taken away from us, and very shame
at our enforced idleness will drive us to follow men
into doing, each the work for which we are really fitted.
Those of us who are born teachers and mothers (for
the two words ought to mean about the same thing)
will train ourselves expertly to care for the children
of the world, collected for many hours a day in
school-homes of various sorts. Those of us who have
not this natural capacity for wise and beneficent asso-
ciation with the young (and many who love children
dearly are not gifted with wisdom in their treat-
ment) will do other parts of the necessary work of
the world.

But that time is still in the future. At present our
teachers can no more adopt the utter freedom and
the reverence for individual differences which con-
stitute the essence of the " Montessori method " than
a cog in a great machine can, of its own volition,
begin to turn backwards. And here is the oppor-
tunity for us, the mothers, perhaps among the last

SOME LAST REMARKS 239

of the race who will be allowed the inestimable delight
and joy of caring for our own little children, a de-
light and joy of which society, sooner or later, will
consider us unworthy on account of our inexpertness,
our carelessness, our absorption in other things, our
lack of wise preparation, our lack of abstract good
judgment.

Our part during this period of transition is to
seize upon regenerating influences coming from any
source, and shape them with care into instruments
which will help us in the great task of training little
children, a complicated and awful responsibility, our
pathetically inadequate training for which is offset
somewhat by our passionate desire to do our best.

We can collaborate in our small way with the
scientific founder of the Montessori method, and can
help her to go on with her system (discovered before
its completion) by assimilating profoundly her master-
idea, and applying it in directions which she has not
yet had time finally and carefully to explore, such as
its application to the dramatic and aesthetic instincts
of children.

Above all, we can apply it to ourselves, to our own
tense and troubled lives. We can absorb some of
Dr. Montessori's reverence for vital processes. In-
deed, possibly nothing could more benefit our children
than a wholehearted conversion on our part to her
great and calm trust in life itself.

INDEX

ADULT analysis of children's

problems, 143, 148, 155
Age of children in Montes-

sori schools, 9
Animal training different

from child training, 156
Apathetic child, the, 42
Apparatus :

Broad stair, 73, 101
Buttoning frames, 14,

16, 56, 135
Colour spools, 74
Explanation of, 100
Geometric insets, flat,

77
Geometric insets,

solid,

How to use, 68, 92, 93,

100

Long stair, 101, 193
The Tower, 72, 101
Arithmetic, beginnings of, 17,
101

" Bad child," the, treatment

of, 33
Broad stair, the. See Appa-

ratus
Buttoning frames. See Ap-

paratus

Democracy, basis of Montes-

sori system, 119, 188
Discipline, 32, 142-51

Exercises, gymnastic, 147, 149 ;
for legs, 113; for balance,
114. 116, 150

16 241

Exercises, sensory :
Baric, 66, 102
Blindfolded, 18
Colour games, 75
Colour matching, 74
Hearth-side seed-game,

in

In dimension, 17
In folding up, 108-10
Instinctive desire for,

53-5
Not entire occupation

of children, 69
Simplicity of, 55
In smelling, 65-6
Tactile, 60, 61, 101, 116
In tasting, 65-6
By use of water, 151-3
By use of weights, 66,

102

Family life, how affected by
Montessori system, 122

Freedom, 32, 103-4, 119-27,
I3I-3

Gardens, value of, in child-
training, 201-2, 205-6

Geometric insets. See Ap-
paratus

Individuality, respect for, of
Montessori system, 41, 94

Interest, a prerequisite to
education, 31, 94-9, 190-2

Kindergarten compared with
Montessori system, 22, 172-

242

INDEX

95 ; as to self-annihilation
of teacher, 1 80 ; as to
absence of supervision, 181 ;
as to social life of children,
185 ; as to overstimulation,
189-90

Lesson of silence, 44-8
Long stair. See Apparatus

Mental concentration, 144-6
Music, 20- 1

New pupils, 38-41
Number of pupils in Montes-
sori school, 9

Obedience, 154-65
Observation of children, ne-
cessity for, 93-5
Overstimulation, 189-90

Patience of children, 139, 191-2
Plants, care of, for children,
202-6

Reading, 89-91
Responsibility, inculcation of,
35. 36, 70-1. U7. 202

School day, length of, 38
School-equipment, 9, 60
Self-control of children, 143-7
Self-dependence of children,
24, 103, in, 133-4, 138-9,

i?7

Slowness of children, 22-3, 136
Social life of children, 185,

207-8
Supervision, absence of, n,

102-4, 180-1, 192-5

Theoretic basis of Montessori
system, vi, 49, 57, 104, 121,
124. See also under Demo-
cracy, Freedom, Individual-
ity, Interest, Responsibility,
Self-dependence

Touch, sense of, 57-9 ; exer-
cises for. See Exercises,
Sensory

Tower, the. See Apparatus

Writing, training for, begin-
nings of, 6 1 ; theory under-
lying, 80-9 ; alphabet, 83 ;
spontaneous writing, 84-5 ;
time required to learn, 88

Printed by Haull. H'a/xoN 6- Vtnty, L4., London and Ayltshury.

V

•

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY, LOS ANGELES
EDUCATION AND PSYCHOLOGY LIBRARY
This book is DUE on the last date stamped below.

RECEIVED

MOV 1 8 137!

FPU./r>?Yrif,
...nTFP LOAN

RECEIVED

AW 3 0 1974

EDU.IPSYCM. Ql

LIBRARY

jyN 878-Kl
ED/PSYCH I IB.

JUN 2 8 1982

RECEIVED

JUN 9 '82-1 PM

ED/PSYCH LIB.

ECE1VEO

LIB.

rm L9-10m-6.'69(N137088)4939A— 3. 59

THE LIBRARY

tJNIVERSITV OF" CALIFORNIA
1LOS ANGEt.EJ*

UCLA-ED/PSYCH Library

LB 775 M76F5 1913

L 005 597 160 0

UC SOUTHERN REGjONAL LIBRARY FAC,UTY

A 000 968 689 0